


said the ibex to the magpie

by TheSilverQueen



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Hannibal is a Cannibal, M/M, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8491402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSilverQueen/pseuds/TheSilverQueen
Summary: In a world where dæmons can recognize and imprint on soulmates, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter still can't manage to get their act together.* * * * * * The first time Will sees the magpie, it's just at the edge of his property, ever watchful yet seemingly not at all bothered by his rambunctious pack of tumbling, barking dogs.The first time Hannibal sees the ibex, it's carefully sniffing at the black wooden stag statue he keeps in his office, tail swishing gently from side to side.





	1. for here we descend into the Rabbit warren

**Author's Note:**

> Soooooo this is an idea I developed for the Hannibal Big Bang but, um, promptly failed to get off the ground in time, so I withdrew it from there and reworked it for NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don't know, National Novel Writing Month takes place during November and during it crazy people like me (and some of your other favorite authors) attempt to pump out 50,000 words in a single month. I highly doubt I'll cross that threshold, but the challenge does guarantee that this story will be complete by November 30. Hopefully I do it justice.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter the dæmons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter title is a play on the saying: "down the rabbit hole", because let's be honest, Hannibal is a big fricking warren of holes.

It’s the oldest legend in the entire world, the idea that soulmates were once one whole soul cleaved into two and scattered across time and space. It’s the leading theory as to why dæmons are the one who recognize soulmates first, a process that science calls “cognitive recognition” and that most people call “imprinting”. 

Still, both science and religion scoff upon the oldest legend of them all, which is that dæmons – sometimes, just sometimes – retain the power to unite the soul again once found and wander the earth together. Believers claim evidence in the mythical animals of old: the unicorn (clearly a rhino and a horse, they say) and the dragon (clearly a lizard and a winged animal of some kind) but most simply dismiss it as legends about as truthful as the unicorns and dragons themselves.

Of course, at the heart of every legend lies a single seed of truth, and every story, in its own way, is a fairytale.

* * *

Once upon a time, deep in the forests of Virginia, there was a little stream in the woods. The stream was teaming with fish and other aquatic creatures, and the surrounding woods were filled with wildlife and flourishing trees and flowers. And one crisp morning, a magpie with sleek black feathers noticed something interesting whilst flying overhead, and dropped down to a nearby branch to have a closer look.

There, standing in the middle of the stream with its mouth dipped down to drink, was an ibex. It had tawny fur and strong legs, and did not seem at all bothered by the chilly air of the morning.

“Hello,” said the magpie to the ibex.

“Go away,” said the ibex to the magpie.

The magpie fluffed its wings. It did not seem bothered by the response, or perhaps it was merely considering how best to peck at the ibex’s hindquarters. “I believe,” said the magpie, “that the proper response is to reply with a similar affirmation of greeting. Perhaps a ‘good morning’ or a ‘greetings’ would be a more appropriate term.”

The ibex gave a great snort. “Are you attempting to school me on how best to greet someone?”

“Clearly your teachers were remiss upon this, and so it is my duty to remedy this tragedy,” the magpie said solemnly.

“No one wants to greet an ibex. They want to eat an ibex.”

“I do not want to eat you,” said the magpie with a little chirp. 

Perhaps it was the eagerness of the response or the little chirp, but either way, the ibex finally turned around to heave itself out of the stream, clambering onto the banks with a few huffs. It shook itself carefully, scattering water droplets, and then finally lifted its gaze to the magpie, which chirped again in welcome and hopped to a lower branch. Their eyes met.

“Oh,” said the magpie.

“Oh,” said the ibex.

For a long moment, there was silence.

The magpie fluttered to the ground as the ibex sat down, and for a long moment, they communicated as only dæmons can, in some huffs and snorts and chirps and flutters of a language that no human understands – at least, not anymore.

“Was it good to see me?” asked the magpie, when they finally separated.

“Good?” The ibex shook its head, but not in negativity, a slow shake of its entire body. “I do not know.”

“My human will adore you,” said the magpie, pleased and proud.

“My human will probably hate you,” said the ibex, wry and resigned.

“Good-bye, Mara.”

“Good-bye, Riva.”

Duty of politeness thus discharged, the magpie took off in a flutter of wings. The ibex watched its ascent into the clouds with a wistful look upon its face, and then, once the black speck was too small to be seen even by animal eyes, the ibex heaved itself to its feet and started trotting back home.

There was work to be done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we have it! The first taste of my dæmons!AU. :D I hope you liked it, and the next chapter is like . . . 98% done so I plan for it to make an appearance in about two or three days, see you then!


	2. for you are the Animal of my eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Garret Jacob Hobbs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is a play of the saying: "You are the apple of my eye". My incorporation is slightly ridiculous but then again so is this entire fic :D

The first time Will sees the magpie, he thinks nothing of it. It’s merely a small black bird, preening itself on the edge of the branch as Will, yawning and barefoot, lets his mangy pack out for the morning. Birds won’t generally come near his house because of his excitable dogs, even if they’re mostly harmless, so he doesn’t even give it a second glance, too busy shivering in the cool morning air and watching his pups roll about and play.

The second time, he still doesn’t think too much of it, because the magpie is sitting still as a stone on his porch railing, seemingly unbothered by the barks and whines of his pack.

The third time, he finally does stop, because the magpie is actually sitting on the top of his car, watching him with unusual steadiness. There is no fear, no retreat like a real animal would, but Will can’t see or sense any human nearby and most dæmons can’t wander too far from their human counterparts.

“Hello,” Will says cautiously.

The magpie moves then, fluffing itself up with pride, and responds with a little chirp.

“Where’s your human?” Will asks curiously. “Are you hurt?”

The magpie hops a step closer, and Will almost extends a hand before remembering that this is likely a dæmon, and rule number one about dæmons is that you never, ever touch someone else’s. Even in the dirtiest, grittiest wars, touching a dæmon was a taboo that almost every culture around the world held true to, because violation of another person’s soul was so anathema to most people that the thought of touching a dæmon wouldn’t even occur to them.

Unfortunately, just then one of Will’s dogs slips loose from his sitter’s overcrowded hands and Zoe comes barreling up to him, barking in joy, and by the time Will’s recaptured her and settled the sitter down, the magpie is nowhere to be seen.

“Well, okay then,” Will says with a shrug, and gets in his car.

Overhead, the magpie circles and circles and circles, and, with a proud little cheep, begins to follow.

* * *

The first time Hannibal sees the ibex, he’s returning from a lunch appointment with a delightful former student when he finds his study door just slightly ajar, as if a child had slipped in. It’s enough to make him step lightly and quietly through, wondering if dinner is going to be truly quite fresh tonight.

Instead, Hannibal finds no person or officer waiting for him.

Instead, there’s a tawny little ibex, nosing gently at the dark wooden stag statue he has across the office. The ibex is plump and lithe, a story in survival and good upbringing, and the casual way it sniffs at his floor and noses around his room makes Hannibal almost want to sit down and capture its beauty.

Hannibal closes the door with a snap. “Hello, little one,” he says, “how did you get in here?”

To its credit, the ibex realizes when it’s in the presence of a stronger predator. Its ears flick nervously before settling cautiously halfway back, and its legs tense and lower, as if to run. Yet it does not flee from his presence, doesn’t try and run for the bathroom or the private exit. It just stands there, tense and sides heaving as it inhales, as if caught directly in between flight or fight and actually frozen in time.

“Did you squeeze through my door?” Hannibal continues, taking another step closer.

Dæmons don’t necessarily obey every law of physics. How could they, when in childhood they can go from a wriggling little worm to a full fledged dragon in a few seconds? Yet this one looks settled, and Hannibal knows for sure that none of his current patients have an ibex, and Hannibal has no patients with unsettled dæmons. 

The ibex paws nervously at the floor, and then when Hannibal frowns at it, immediately stops.

Well. At least it has some manners.

“Where is your human?”

The ibex’s ears swivel, and its head turns just slightly, pointing as if towards the door. Close enough for no pain, but far enough that its human isn’t rushing to come close at its panic. Interesting.

“Do you have a name?” Hannibal inquires. All dæmons do, but most won’t speak if not in the presence of their human, yet Hannibal gets the feeling that this one is rather less reliant on its human than most. After all, it managed to sneak into his building, climb the stairs, and squeeze through his door all on its own.

And besides, Hannibal knows exactly how far a dæmon can stray from their human. Even now, he can feel Riva circling overhead, far away, far enough that most people would call him unnatural or a witch.

Except that only makes him more interested in this dæmon, not less.

Unfortunately, after three more steps, the dæmon seems to decide that that is where to draw the line, because in a blur of long legs the ibex goes sprinting past him in huge bounds, gracefully knocking his door open with a twist of its elegant head and then, with a noisy clatter of hooves, bouncing down the stairs and out into the streets, so fast that Hannibal’s barely turned around in the time it takes for him to hear the ibex reach the street and vanish among the crowds.

Hannibal takes a deep breath. He smells fresh water and fish and grass, and most peculiar of all, dog. And not dæmon dog, a real actual breathing, panting, furry dog.

“Good to see you too,” Hannibal says to thin air.

* * *

If Will had bothered to make eye contact in Jack’s office, he might have noticed Hannibal’s tendency to collect things – particularly shiny things, and Will himself is a rather shiny prize – and he might have made the connection.

If Hannibal had taken a little bit of a deeper breath, he might have smelled the scent of Will beneath his cologne – fresh water and grass and fish and dog – and he might have made the connection.

Instead, Will walks out with a new thorn in his side, forgetting entirely about the magpie in his fury, and Hannibal walks out with a new set of stars to set his eyes upon, forgetting entirely about the ibex in his wonderment. Outside, deep in the little forest of trees by Quantico, a magpie alights on a nearby branch where an ibex is standing, and although both are quite comfortable with each other, neither makes a move to reach out and touch, even though the ibex can tell the magpie is dying to touch.

“Humans,” sighs the ibex.

“Humans,” sighs the magpie.

* * *

When Hannibal wakes Will up at the crack of dawn, Will spares half a second to be grateful that Mara is outside wandering around before Hannibal is taking over the entire room with his presence, rearranging the chair and table, plating some steaming food, and inviting Will to eat with playfully blank eyes and a welcome tone. Mostly because Mara is also completely not a morning dæmon and would likely have kicked the door shut in Hannibal’s face before the man could even speak, or head-butted him in more unseemly parts.

Either way, it seems to be for the best. Hannibal plays charming and engaging, and Will puts on his tried-and-true GO AWAY suit and watches every single punch be smoothly ducked or dodged.

“Where’s your dæmon?” Will asks finally, as his eggs are almost done and he still hasn’t managed to make Hannibal even blink in surprise. Asking about dæmons is rude, but hey, Will doesn’t care about rudeness and he’s also kind of curious, so as far as he’s concerned it’s a win-win scenario.

“My dæmon prefers the open air to more . . . crowded spaces,” Hannibal replies, neatly scooping up some egg fragments like it’s no big deal. 

“What is she?”

Hannibal somehow manages to frown at him without moving any of his facial muscles, and Will inwardly cheers. It’s the biggest reaction he’s gotten out of the man yet, even if it is somewhat akin to a schoolteacher scolding an unruly child.

“I will only answer that with yes or no.”

“Fair enough,” Will concedes, because it really is. A dæmon’s form can tell a lot about a human, and while Will generally is pretty good at figuring out things on his own thanks to his empathy, it’s still not everything. Will reads the human – the impulses, the curiosities, the patterns. A dæmon represents the true depths of a person’s soul, all their deepest secrets and desires, everything they are in one settled form. A dæmon is literally a person’s soul, and Will is many things but he isn’t a soulreader. 

Hannibal sets down his fork and dabs daintily at his face with a napkin that he brings out from . . . somewhere. Will would guess pocket, but Hannibal doesn’t look like the sort to carry out napkins without cause, and his breast pocket has a pocket square in it anyways, because fashion.

“And you?”

“Mara’s around here somewhere,” Will says, closing his eyes. His ibex is currently grazing in a nearby patch of grass. Mara’s a lot more socially talented than Will – they always used to joke that Mara got the social bit and Will got the empathy – but she still prefers being alone just like him. They’re not quite so reliant on each other’s company as those humans and dæmons who remain in constant contact.

“Interesting name,” Hannibal comments. “It represents the sea in Gaelic but bitterness and sorrow in its origin.”

Will shovels more eggs into his face. It’s not like _he_ chose Mara’s name. Mara chose her own name, and yes, it’s not “normal” because generally the dæmons of the parents chose the baby dæmon’s name the same way the human parents name the baby, but Will’s parents were, at that point, more interested in clawing at each other’s throats than naming their baby, so Will got his grandfather’s name and Mara nudged over a baby book name and picked the first name she liked the look of. 

“Next thing you’re gonna tell me it’s the name of a goddess,” Will says flatly.

Hannibal smiles, just slightly. “Indeed, I was. A Hindu goddess, in fact, one who stands for destruction and death and winter and the moon.”

“You must be someone’s worst nightmare on trivia night.”

Hannibal’s smile vanishes, and for the first time he looks out of place. “Trivia night?”

“Seriously, no one’s ever used you for trivia?”

“I question that nature of your ‘trivia night’ if such common facts are considered worthy of special status and celebration.”

“Scratch it, I know exactly why no one’s ever used you for trivia,” Will says with a sigh, and finishes his damn breakfast.

* * *

“But why would he do such a thing?” Hannibal asks, as Will blatantly breaks the posted speed limit. “Why would he kill in his daughter’s image?”

Will looks at his speedometer and wishes he could go even faster. “Animal of my eye,” he says.

Hannibal blinks. “An old saying,” he says, because of course Hannibal knows about it. “One referring to the most precious object in a person’s point of view, something or someone they cherish above all else.”

“He can’t kill her, but he can’t let her leave, so he just – he just kills other people who look like her, and he honors them because he can’t honor her, and he thinks it’s, it’s better somehow, like that, a way to tangle her close and tie her with secrets.”

“Honors?”

Will swallows. “I – I’m pretty sure that we’re not finding bodies for a reason.”

To the doctor’s credit, he does not immediately turn green or attempt to reject the contents of the rather hearty breakfast he’d fed them at the suggestion of cannibalism. Hannibal merely shifts, ever so slightly, not as if uncomfortable but as if allowing a new puzzle piece to slide into place, easy as breathing, as he backs up to look at the new big picture the puzzle piece has allowed to come into view.

“The original saying,” Hannibal murmurs quietly, “was ‘the apple of my eye’. To behold your most precious object and yet be able to carry a part of it within you forever.”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Yet it changed when more information about dæmons came to light, and we realized the true depth of our connection to them. Now we no longer had to travel great distances for fruit or even acquire special equipment to look deep into the pupils of the eye; instead, all of our secrets were there, for all the world to know, in the animal we kept quietly at our side.”

Hannibal’s voice is strangely hypnotic; Will almost feels compelled to slow down and ask for more.

Yet he spies a flash of black in the sky, like a fleeing bird, and from there he remembers the shrike, beady-eyed and puffed up, perching in the field where they’d found the copycat, and Will thinks maybe, just maybe, that bird wasn’t just a bird. Maybe the Minnesota Shrike knows more about the investigation than is best.

Will digs out his phone and throws it at Hannibal. “Call Crawford or the FBI. Tell them we need back-up.”

“Has something changed?”

“I don’t think the shrike is just a title to this guy,” Will says. “I’m pretty sure I saw a shrike sitting in the bushes when I was talking to Jack over the little field kabuki earlier.”

“Field kabuki?” And goddamn it Hannibal doesn’t sound amused at that.

“Just – just call Jack. Because the shrike wasn’t the only animal I saw sitting in tree.”

“Oh?”

“There was a chameleon there too.”

* * *

Afterwards, when it’s all said and done, as they wheel away the still body of Abigail Hobbs and start taking photographs of the very bloody crime scene, Will feels Mara reach for him, concern and panic in her mind.

 _I’m fine,_ Will tells her. Their connection is generally strong enough for words, but not complicated phrases, and like all human-dæmon bonds, images work better than words. Emotions work too, but Will’s not about to open up that can of worms right now. Right now he craves the feeling of Mara’s steady legs around him, her hooves griping the slippery slope Will is desperately trying not to slide off.

 _Humans_ , Mara sends back. _Don’t be alone, Will._

Will looks up. 

Hannibal is still here too, bloody all down his hands and shirt as the paramedics pester him. He deals with them with his standard grace, but Will can see how annoyance takes bites out of his manners here and there. Will is envious of him, his unflinching face and his steady hands, holding Abigail Hobbs together as her chameleon had gasped and writhed on the floor, whilst her father and mother had been surrounded by the dying sparking embers of their dæmons as they passed.

_I’ll be fine._

Mara snorts. _You better be._

* * *

Hannibal brings more food that night, a sumptuous dinner that Will really thinks he should wonder about its origins but currently is too hungry to care.

“You are very quiet,” Hannibal observes.

“Default setting.”

Hannibal eyes him, but there’s no blaring LIAR LIAR LIAR emanating from him, which is a relief given how much Will’s been subjected to it from Jack and the paramedics and everyone else. If anything, Hannibal’s current state is more akin to, “How cute, he thinks he can hide it.” Will probably should take offense to that, but the chicken teriyaki really tastes pretty good and Hannibal’s not trying to make him meditate or pack him off to a therapist, so for now Will figures he’s still in Will’s good books.

“Tell me more,” Will says, before Hannibal can try to poke at him more.

“About what?”

“Mara. What the name means.”

Hannibal smiles that small little smile of his, and obliges.

* * *

The magpie is preening herself when she spies the ibex moving through the forest, picking a careful path through the brush so as not to make everything sound like a great big animal crashing through the bushes.

“Hello,” says the magpie, “how did you like our office?”

The ibex snorts, because there’s obvious and then there’s shouting it to the entire damn world. “Honestly, how has no one put two and two together?”

The magpie shrugs. “Humans are blind. Dæmons see with true sight, yet most are too clouded by their humans’ suffering to notice.”

For a long moment, there is silence.

“Do you enjoy playing games?” the ibex asks abruptly, ears lowering.

The magpie pauses. There is danger there, in the tone of the ibex, and although the magpie can fly, the ibex is strong and relentless. The magpie might enjoy the chase, but the ibex would still take its reckoning.

“Do you object to my human’s games?” asks the magpie.

The ibex snarls, low and deep. “If my human gets hurt,” says the ibex, “I will take my vengeance from your human, soulmate or no.”

“To hurt me is to hurt you.”

“If I’m already hurt,” replies the ibex, “a little more will not matter in the grand scheme of things.”

The magpie bows. “I will try my best.”

“Or else.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna be honest, I chose Will and Hannibal's dæmon names by flipping through a fantasy name generator until I found something I liked the look & sound of and had an interesting meaning. So: [here](http://www.sheknows.com/baby-names/name/riva) is my rationale for Riva, because "from the shore" and "regain strength" sounded good to me for Hannibal, and [here](http://www.sheknows.com/baby-names/name/mara) is my rationale for Mara, because "bitter" pretty much sums up Will.
> 
> Tune in next time for Chapter 3: "for this is how you play the game of Vendettas"


	3. for this is how you play the game of Vendettas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Tobias Budge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're going out of order, folks! (Sorry, I arranged my whole plotline and then realized that the episodes were out of order, but . . . hey that's how it made sense in my head.)
> 
> Chapter title is a nod to Game of Thrones, which sucked me in last season and dragged me down to its dark, dangerous depths.

“I kissed Alana Bloom,” Will says, and there.

Right there.

In the back of Hannibal’s mind, he feels a distant tug, and if he had been paying attention, he might have realized that the tug was his dæmon, as Riva nearly tumbles from the air in shock at the words, but in reality, Hannibal in this moment could not be thinking of anything except Will, even the corporeal manifestation of his soul.

There is something dark and ugly creeping up from the depths of the frozen, twisted, malformed thing that resides in his chest, and Hannibal gives into it to feel the pure pleasure as it washes over him.

“Well,” Hannibal says, as Will brushes by him smelling of perfume and snow and dog, “come in.”

The next words that come from his mouth are automatic, his instincts and person suit kicking in to recover as his mind whirls into action. Will’s attraction to Alana is not surprising; the man yearns for stability and reeks of insecurity. Of course he would have clutched at anything that seemed stable, and Alana is the woman who knows her limits well enough to deny him.

Hannibal has no such intentions.

“My main concern,” Hannibal says finally, “is why you felt the need to drive an hour in the snow and rain to tell _me_ about it.”

Will’s face flushes. Hannibal would call it a blush, but that would be incorrect. Will not does feel shy or pleased right now. He feels alone and confused and resigned and bitter. Hannibal imagines that if he were to take a bite of Will now, he would taste the echoing loneliness of a man who both desperately wants connection yet also rejects it for fear of tainting it with his presence. He imagines it would taste glorious.

“I just . . . I don’t know,” Will mumbles, pushing around the food on his plate.

Hannibal accepts the answer, because he can see the truth in every wince of Will’s body. Will truly did not think at all. He simply got into his car and drove, and his mind and hands and feet brought him here.

The thought helps quell the dark monster, but only a little.

“Why did you not seek out your dæmon?”

Dæmons are not perfect. They are not lie-detectors or truth-seekers, but they are part of every human, undeniably so. Sometimes dæmons are quicker to realize truths than their humans, and Hannibal has learned to listen to Riva’s counsel in some matters. Even he, with all of his planning and expertise and experience, still misses things sometimes that her sharp eyes and unclouded mind can spot a mile away. He still remembers the way she’d swooped in during his very first kill, claws and beak sharp and deadly in a way he’d never expected, and she’d flown away with a man’s eyeball before anyone had even had time to react.

Riva may look an innocent magpie of black and white, collecting shiny baubles and soft feathers to line her nest, but she is still a predator, just the same as him.

Will scruffs a foot along the floor. “Mara is . . . She doesn’t always, you know. Understand. She thinks very straightforward.”

“Sometimes situations are straightforward.”

“Not this one,” Will says with a painful laugh, as though everything is crashing down upon him at once. “I mean . . . god, I kissed Alana Bloom. I think I just destroyed a friendship right there.”

Hannibal sets his utensils down. While he sees no harm in driving a wedge between Alana and Will, he does understand that depriving Will of everything at once could cause him to become even more unpredictable than Hannibal requires of him. And while Hannibal enjoys Will’s unpredictability, it still makes him a dangerous piece of the board. It’s rather like eating fugu – delightful in the danger at hand, but still dangerous all the same.

“Alana is a caring and understanding person. I do not think you will have driven her away forever.”

“Is that my doctor speaking,” Will asks sarcastically, “or my friend?”

“Well,” Hannibal says, “as your friend, I respectfully request that you stay the night here, if that does not put too much strain on your dæmon. I do not wish to awaken and find that you have sleepwalked again in your distress and are in possession of a few less toes and fingers than beforehand.”

Will manages to croak out a laugh at that, strained and bitter, but still a laugh. The tension still slightly releases from his shoulders.

“Your dæmon won’t care that I’m intruding upon your den?”

Hannibal hums. Some dæmons can be incredibly territorial of their humans and by extension their humans’ homes. It’s why Hannibal favors drugs and sneak attacks as the Ripper; less chance of a dæmon interfering and causing a scene. 

“Riva does not belong to a class of animals that establishes a den,” Hannibal remarks, which earns him a side-eye from Will for his dodging. “Do not worry, Will; Riva and I are one, as you and Mara are one. She does not wish to see you injured or hurt anymore than I do. You are as welcome in her territory as you are welcome in my home.”

If Will had been in his right mind, Hannibal knows that Will would have understood the significance of Hannibal’s language, but for now, Will just nods wearily and lets Hannibal lead him to bed.

* * *

Riva flutters into his bedchamber through the specially made door only an hour or two after Will has drifted off to an uneasy sleep. Her gaze is disapproving as Hannibal dons his favorite sweater and pants for a little light reading before bed.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been gone for half a night, and already you’ve gained two vendettas,” Riva says. “What on earth have you been up to?”

“I was under the impression that you supported the idea of us not sharing Will Graham.”

“Will Graham is ours. That does not mean a vendetta against every person who so much as eyes his behind.”

“On the contrary,” Hannibal says, “I think there will be ample opportunity to replicate new recipes with those who have the misfortune of . . . ‘eyeing his behind’.”

Riva sighs. “You are impossible.” But her tone is fond, so Hannibal knows she means no harm. Riva is far less forgiving about any margin of error Hannibal might make, as she hates closed spaces even more than he hates the idea of being caged and studied behind bars. She always urges caution, even if Hannibal can practically taste the murder in her gaze when she comes across the rude sheep and pigs Hannibal enjoys culling for food.

When Hannibal reaches out, Riva flies to him with a soft chirp, coming to a rest on his shoulder and rubbing her cool, sleek feathers against his cheek. As a child, it had been her favored position, no matter her animal form, but now that they can travel such far distances from each other, she rarely perches on him.

“I think there are other ways of dealing with Alana Bloom,” Riva tells him. “Tobias Budge, I leave to you.”

“How generous.”

“I am always generous with you. Perhaps too much.”

“You and I are one.”

Riva pulls away and gazes him with steady black eyes, as steady as the day Hannibal left her behind to seek out his pigs who had butchered her family. She had understood exactly why he had done what he had done, yet still, sometimes, Hannibal feels that she hasn’t quite forgiven him.

Most days, he knows it was worth it.

Other days . . . other days, he is not quite sure.

“The left hand still might not know what the right hand does,” Riva says mysteriously, and then flutters off in search of food.

* * *

Tobias Budge’s demon is a slender snake, uncoiling and hissing like the viper it is as he stands before them, proud and bloodied. Hannibal can smell the distinct scent of Will on the air, as well as gunpowder, and his attempts to rein in his smile are the reason why he leaves Franklyn and his mouse to bluster and poster.

Still, every game grows tiring around a while.

Riva dives at the same moment Hannibal stands, and in a second, Franklyn’s neck is broken as Riva stabs the mouse’s neck with pinpoint accuracy. Franklyn falls to the floor with a thud as his dæmon vanishes into golden dust.

For a long moment, Budge and his snake just stare. Then: “I wanted to do that.”

“I saved you the trouble,” Hannibal replies, because he knows exactly how much Budge was annoyed by Franklyn, and to have his death annoy Budge as much as his life is an achievement Hannibal will carry proudly for as long as he can. And by that he means about as long as it takes to gather enough convincing wounds to distract the police.

Riva chirps. “Ten minutes?”

“I wager five.”

“You’ll lose.”

Budge’s face contorts. “You are – you are betting? On what?”

“On how long it takes you to realize that you are outmatched,” Hannibal says, as sympathetically as he can manage. “The FBI are on your trail, and even now I imagine your story and image is being circulated by the press. You will not be able to hide much longer.”

“Oh, I don’t care about hiding,” Budge replies. “I care that I took my hands and I wrapped them around the throat of your little pet whilst my dæmon embraced his dæmon, and that I watched the golden dust coat me as I ran. Now that – that, my friend – is what it means to be god, not your silly showmanship and dressed up corpses.”

Riva goes still, and the dark monster that dwells in Hannibal’s belly rises from the water, dangerous and dark with fury.

Will was _theirs_ , and if anyone was to kill lovely, dearest, sweet Will, it would have been Hannibal’s hands around his throat and Riva’s beak at his dæmon’s neck, not this imposter with no skill and little depth.

Still, to his credit, Budge understands that words are nothing without actions, so at the very least, he attacks immediately afterwards, and Riva is free to freefall to the snake she’d so hated and give it an ample piece of her mind and beak and claws, as it hisses and writhes on the floor. Hannibal takes a few hits, a stab wound he didn’t quite mean to, and a bloody wrist, and after that he calls it and lets nature take its course. Riva gets the final blow, a vicious rip that nearly beheads Budge’s dæmon, as Hannibal lets the stag statue come crashing down.

After that, there is no discussion of a winner or loser.

As soon as they heal, Hannibal knows, he and Riva will take their vengeance on every single person left to stand in their way.

“For Will,” Hannibal says.

Riva fluffs her wings. “For Mara.”

Hannibal bathes in the golden dust of his victory, and for the first time, he feels no rush of primal pride. For the first time, he imagines that his victory is not quite worth the price he has paid. 

For the first time, Riva does not come to him when he reaches for her.

* * *

When Will limps into his room, bleeding and dusty and his face shadowed with regret, Hannibal cannot help the way his face changes. He barely registers Riva diving from her mourning perch on the balcony out the window, heading straight outdoors, and thankfully, Will seems more intent on Hannibal than noticing the actions of his dæmon.

“Will,” Hannibal says, and nothing else, because he knows that if he says anything else, everything will come tumbling out.

Will smells of preservatives and rot and the stench of fear, and he is splattered with blood and dust. The way he walks – slowly, with a limp, head tilted as if his balance or hearing is just a little bit off – indicates a struggle, but Hannibal takes no pleasure in it. He’d sent Will to Tobias to test Will’s strength, not to end his life, and he hates that Tobias was able to distract him so with the mere idea of Will’s death. 

Thankfully, the operatives taking pictures and laying down notes pay no attention as Will carefully eases himself against the table with a sigh.

For anyone else, it would have been a death sentence

For Will – well. Will could have emptied all of his drawers and scattered all of his drawings, and right now, Hannibal would still want nothing but to clasp him close and bury him deep within the bone cage of his heart, so that Will could never leave.

“I’m sorry,” Will says suddenly.

“For what?”

“I felt like . . . like I’ve drawn you into the terrors of my world. I didn’t mean to.”

 _Oh, my sweet Will,_ Hannibal wants to say. _It is I who have drawn you into my world._

Instead, he remarks, “I arrived here on my own terms, Will. I find no comfort or joy in that, just the simplicity of truth. And in truth . . . my only concern is that you are alive and in one piece.”

Will prods at his wrist, which bears the bloody marks of piano strings wound tight. Even now, Hannibal can smell the stench of Tobias on his skin, and he longs to wash it away and bind it tight with cloth of his own fashion, to drown out everything but the sweet scent of Will and his dæmon, whoever or wherever she is.

“Sort of one piece.”

Perhaps it is because Riva is not here to caution him, but at that, Hannibal cannot hold back any longer. He gives into to his impulses and touches Will’s arm, his chest, his ear, and his examinations whisper of Will’s struggles and Will’s pain and the ringing Will probably still has in his ears. For his part, Will submits beautifully and without question, baring his throat and eyes and soul to Hannibal’s touches, and in that moment, they are closer than they ever have been, and only the way Will determinedly does not look at this eyes protects him from Hannibal’s last and greatest secret.

“You will need stitches,” Hannibal remarks. “And rest.”

Will squints at him. “I hadn’t guessed.”

“You avoided the EMTs by flashing your badge, did you not?” Hannibal says, letting his disapproval show. Hannibal dodged them too, but he has the necessary supplies and knowledge to treat himself. Will has no such restraint or motivation.

“I thought you said rest, not intensive medical care.”

Hannibal sighs, but it’s a fond sigh and he knows Will knows by the way Will leans into his shoulder as he stands, comfort given and received and returned in a single moment of connection.

“With me or with them, Will.”

“ . . . Fine,” Will grumbles. “I’m relying on your credentials to get me out of this, Mister Doctor.”

Hannibal does, in fact, get them out of it. His displeasure and grief over Will’s supposed death had already caused the medics to give him a wide berth, and a few mentions of names Hannibal still counts as connections from his surgery days is enough to drive off even the most determined, especially since Will sticks to him like a trailing barnacle. Even Agent Crawford takes one look and waves them off with a sigh, intent on processing Hannibal’s office and content in the knowledge that he has at least one of his suspects in sight.

When they’re finally in Hannibal’s car, Will peers at the retreating officers without bothering to disguise his pleasure. “Damn, I might use you more often for that.”

“I am at your service.”

“If I come to you instead, you mean.”

“I will not have a friend running around with half a functioning ear and an infected wrist when I have both the necessary supplies and medical knowledge to treat such things, Will.”

“Spoilsport.”

* * *

That night, after Will has long gone to sleep with Hannibal’s stitches in his wrist and Hannibal’s carefully gathered meat simmering in his belly, Hannibal sits at his table and patiently begins the arduous process of tending to his own wounds. He took care of the most serious ones with Will, but his wrist wound still needs some more inspection to ensure no infection.

This is why Hannibal is awake when he hears the patio door slide open and the soft patter of tiny hooves.

Out of the darkness, the tawny ibex emerges, eyes glowing as she steps gently into the dining room. Despite the snow outside, she seems to have shaken herself off before entering, as her fur is cold and sparkled with wet droplets but no snow.

“Hello, little one,” Hannibal says. “It’s nice to see you again.”

The ibex lets out a little chuff, and he feels strangely pleased by the acknowledgement and the casual way she walks up to him, no fear to be found this time.

Discrete searches online mean that Hannibal guesses the ibex to be female, and her age to be around twenty to thirty years. She seems particularly interested in the needle he is currently threading and the bloody wrist he rests on the table, although she does not cross the final barrier of personal space to actually touch.

“It is nothing to be concerned about,” Hannibal says, and pointedly doesn’t think about how he’s trying to reassure a dæmon. “It is a shallow wound, easily tended. It is not likely to even scar if the proper treatment is applied.”

The ibex flicks her tail and her eyes seem to radiate disapproval, but the soft whuff she gives sends warm air across his hand, so he knows he’s forgiven.

“I was simply defending myself against someone who threatened my safety; that is all. Surely you have done the same.”

The ibex looks down at her strong, limber legs and back up.

Dæmons are not quite entirely like the animals they mimic. Riva flies like the magpie she is, but she can think through her instinctive desire to hunt or her instinctive gut reaction to flee from predators. Ibexes in the wild also tend to flee from predators, taking shelter on the cliffs so steep their hunters cannot safely follow them, but this is a dæmon in the shape of an ibex, not a real one.

“You can hunt as well as any of us,” Hannibal tells her, biting off the end of the thread to begin stitching.

He freezes in surprise when the ibex rears up to her full height, planting her hooves on the table and sniffing intently at the wound. She doesn’t get close enough for her nose to touch his skin, but every sniff sends a breeze across his wounds, and he almost wants to memorize the feel. He’s never been so close to another dæmon since he attempted to carry Mischa through the snow and ice.

Finally, he seems to pass inspection, and the ibex returns to the floor, shoulders relaxed, her eyes fixed on his needle as he steadily stitches his wound closed.

“Thank you,” Hannibal says.

In response, she chuffs again as if to say he’s being ridiculous.

A smile stretches his face against his control, and he wonders at it, that he can communicate so flawlessly with a dæmon who so easily pierces his defenses and wanders through his territory at will, yet he feels no alarm or surprise or anger. It is a remarkably novel experience.

“Will you stay the night, little one?” 

The ibex twitches, as if considering, but eventually she tilts her head from side to side, the best kind of “No” her animal form can offer, and Hannibal accepts it. She dips her neck down in an elegant bow, and then with a soft patter of hooves she’s off, trotting towards the patio door without a second’s hesitation, vanishing easily into the dark.

“Good night,” Hannibal calls.

* * *

Will is awoken by the feeling that he’s being watched, and for the longest moment he lies in Hannibal’s guest bedroom and wonders if Hannibal is going to be greeted come morning by police officers telling him that Will’s been found in the streets again.

But then there’s the softest little chirp, and Will sits bolt upright because generally his hallucinations don’t _begin_ with sounds of birds.

There, sitting on the windowsill with bright beady eyes, is the magpie, her white and black feathers glowing in the moonlight. She’s bigger than Will remembers, less of a cute fluff ball and more a grown up adult bird, fully fledged and strong and aware. Here, more than ever, he is aware that she is a dæmon first and an animal second.

“Hello again,” Will says, after a few cursory rubs of the eyeballs confirm that she’s not an image of his twisted mind.

The magpie lets out another little chirp.

“How did you find me?” Will mumbles. “More the point, why did you find me again?”

A soft flutter of wings is all the warning he has before the magpie decides to leave the windowsill and land right between his outstretched legs, her eyes somehow conveying both _Idiot_ and _Hello_ in the same steady stare of beady eyes, which totally messes with Will’s already scrambled mind in ways he doesn’t really want to examine and god-knows-what-o’clock.

“I’m fine,” Will reassures her, because somehow he senses what he wants to know without words. 

The magpie ruffles her feathers and hops a step closer, as if to say, _Sure you are, crazy human, sure you are_. 

Will thunks his head back against the headboard. “First Hannibal, and now you,” he complains. “Seriously, I am fine. A bit banged up, but fine. I can even hear you chirping in both ears now, and beforehand I couldn’t.”

The magpie gives him a side-eye that could rival Hannibal’s, but something in his sentence seems to make her settle down, because slowly her feathers lower back into place and she seems smaller again, still regal but more akin to the fluff ball Will had first seen her as instead of the piercing bird of prey she’d come to him this time around.

“I am fine,” Will repeats quietly, because even if he hates doctors and their constant badgering, something inside of him is still touched at her wordless concern. “Really.”

The magpie lets out a long sigh, almost like a muted song on exhale at a fraction of its normal volume, yet still she takes off again, circling around him as if to leave him with one last warning before she’s off, darting through the tiny open window in the bathroom and swallowed up by the darkness of the night outside.

“Good-bye, magpie,” Will says, and in the morning when he wakes, he hardly recalls anything about the encounter except for the tiny weight of the magpie sitting so close, closer than any dæmon’s ever gotten to Will before.

It’s that faintest memory of a sensation that distracts him from recognizing the tell-tale hoof prints that trace a steady path away from Hannibal’s house.

* * *

“Are you hurt?” calls the magpie, diving low and landing badly, not even concerned.

The ibex licks at her wounded leg. “I’m getting better.” It’s not a true wound, as only a dæmon can harm another dæmon and the ibex was not close enough to interfere when Budge went to town on her human, but she still bears the faint pain of Will’s wounds on her skin, and that memory drives her instinctively to lick and favor her wounded appendage.

The magpie fluffs her feathers. “Good,” she says, and she means it so sincerely that the ibex does not even chastise her for her role.

“Your human is skilled with the needle,” says the ibex.

“He is a proficient doctor, of both body and mind.”

“And of heart?”

“In that, he has me,” the magpie says firmly.

The ibex’s eyes gleam in the darkness, her tawny fur a sharp contrast to the bed of snow and grass she lays in. “We shall see if he listens to you,” says the ibex.

The magpie sighs. “It’s not like your human is any better.”

“Unfortunately true,” mutters the ibex.

And with that, they part, the ibex trotting solemnly back home as the magpie takes to the air, each content that their human and the other half of their souls are settled and healing as the snow continues to fall around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for Chapter 4: for Everything you can do I can do best
> 
> And yes that was a Doctor Strange reference because 1) I have no shame, 2) Kaecilius is my new shiny fanfic toy to play with now, and 3) . . . I still have no shame. :D


	4. for Everything you can do i can do better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Abel Gideon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oopsie I went out of episode order. My bad. 
> 
> Chapter title is a play of "Everything you can do I can do better", personified by [this fscking song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOpRa4OGD4) I cannot get out of my head by Paint, otherwise known as the guy who did [this other fscking song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diU70KshcjA) I can't get out of my head

Mara is dozing in their office, legs tucked neatly under her as Will grades some paperwork, when they get the call that they’re needed at the BSHCI. Mara’s started to accompany Will to some of the cases when Hannibal can’t, because of all the hallucinations he’s ever had, Mara has never featured in any of them. 

Mara is his touchstone to reality, his anchor in the deep, his guiding voice to the present. What makes her valuable is that she’s not kind or subtle about it either; while Jack or Beverly might shake him to call his name, Mara will not hesitate to stamp on his feet or head butt him, and he often comes back to reality, gasping and shaking, her horns locked between his fingers as she breathes grass-breath in his face. 

“You’re mine,” Mara once told him, fierce and snarling, after having bruised his foot so severely he’d needed crutches and lots of pain medication. “You belong to me, not your nightmares, and I _will_ take you back.”

They’ve often joked that Mara inherited the lion’s share of entitlement while Will got the empathy that made him feel responsible for every poor shmuck that ever lived.

Still, there are some lines Mara refuses to cross, even for him.

“Absolutely not. Why are we even considering going to the nut house?”

“It’s a prison, not a nut house.”

Mara just glares. “It’s where they store the nuts, so therefore it’s a nut house,” she says unrepentantly, because Mara’s opinion of doctors and psychiatrists is even lower than Will’s. Will blames that one time a shrink’s lion dæmon got too close and growly and Mara kicked him down the stairs, resulting in a permanent ban from that particular hospital – not that Will had been too disappointed, though, to be honest. “Again, why are you going?”

Will pauses. Dæmons are always more aware of their human selves than humans of dæmons, mostly because Mara is constantly surrounded by real animals that remind her that she’s not quite one, and so although she sometimes does mix up the plural and singular pronouns, it’s usually significant when she does so intentionally.

“You’re going to wait in the car?”

Mara snorts. “I’m going to wait in your office. Frederick Chilton is a vulture.”

“Actually, I believe he has a crow he’s passing off as a raven,” Will remarks. It’s not uncommon to try and pass your dæmon off as something else, especially if you feel ashamed or wanting something more, and given how many times Will’s seen Chilton pandering to high society, he can definitely imagine him passing off his common crow as a sleek and mysterious raven.

“Not much better.”

Will leans down and passes a hand over her fur, and she responds with a gentle nudge of her head against his stomach. Even when he’d been a child, Mara had almost always had fur in every animal form she chose, because it made it that much easier to cuddle with Will and keep him warm in the cold nights when they hadn’t had the money to pay for heat. To Will, the feel of Mara’s fur is reassuring and familiar, to the point where he no longer really registers the bright spark of his soul meeting his body. They’ve spent so many nights curled up together, tangled so close they can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, and now Will-and-Mara is less a revelation and more a homecoming.

“I’ll come back to you,” Will says, because words are important.

Not come “for” you, even if Will does have to drive her home. Come back to her, because he belongs to Mara, and when you sleepwalk from time to time, actions don’t really mean a lot. Words mean a lot.

Mara chuffs. “You better. Or I will kick down those doors and drag you out by your skin.”

Amused, Will tells her, “I think the doors are a bit strong even for you.”

“I have friends. Well. A friend,” Mara amends, eyes gleaming as she curls back up in the corner of his office she’s claimed for her own. “You might say she’s . . . highly placed.”

“I thought we didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

Mara yawns. “And I thought we agreed that six dogs was enough.”

“You love Winston.”

“And your point is?”

Will opens his mouth to reply, but he’s cut off by a text alert that manages to sound angry even in its cheeriest “ding” tone, because Jack Crawford is still a bear even though electronic communication. So instead, he just hugs Mara and then makes his way out, onwards to the nuthouse of his worst nightmares.

* * *

Will takes one look at the dead nurse and immediately knows that it is not a kill belonging to the Chesapeake Ripper. It has all the skill, but none of the passion, and the one defining thing about the Ripper has always been his or her passion. 

“It’s not the Ripper,” Will announces.

Chilton’s crow squawks in indignation, just as the human he’s attached to flaps his hands. “Yes it is!” Chilton insists. “It’s a perfect recreation, right down to every single detail, even ones that were not released to the detail! And there’s been no Ripper kill in the years he’s been imprisoned, for which I take no small amount of credit for, so yes, he is the Ripper!”

Will looks at Jack, whose bear dæmon is carefully watching Will as Jack himself looks at the bloody crime scene. 

“It’s not the Ripper,” Will repeats.

“Are you sure?” Jack asks.

Will looks at the nurse again. He sees himself punch her throat, destroy her eyes, mutilate her body, and for a second, the world blurs around him and he’s not quite sure who he is, Will Graham or the Chesapeake Ripper or the Abel Gideon who thinks he’s the Chesapeake Ripper, and he feels at once a burning urge to run far away from the looming hospital and an urge to burn the whole place down.

There’s a soft growl, and Will jolts back to the present to see Jack’s bear prowling around him.

“Yeah,” Will manages to say. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Chilton lets out a mangled screech and takes a step forward, nearly jolting his crow off his perch on his shoulder. “No, it’s definitely the Ripper! Look again!”

Will looks again, and the world blurs again, but this time, when he wakes up, he’s not in the hospital. He’s in the hallway outside his office, a folder tucked under his arm and a coffee cup in his hand, people walking by him, and he has no memory at all how he managed to end up there, and the world begins to blur again as Will begins to shake.

There’s a distant boom, and then Will crashes to the floor as Mara topples him over, planting her strong legs around his body.

“You’re mine!” Mara says, loud enough that it echoes in the walls of Will’s twisting mind. “You’re mine, Will Graham, don’t you dare give in! You promised to come back to me, so _come back to me, damn it_!”

Will reaches up in desperation and grasps her horns, strong and curved and unshakeable, and for a wild second he sees not the ibex that is the other half of his soul but the black feathered stag of his nightmares, snorting hot breath on his vulnerable neck as its horns slice into the delicate skin upon its palms, and as its lips move, Will hears nothing but the rising buzz of an ear-shattering cry, and even as the stag begins to suffocate him, Will is incapable of letting go, locked together with the nightmare stag in life and death.

Mara takes that moment to head-butt him, and Will’s eyes fly open to find Mara snapping her teeth in her face, inches from his nose.

“YOU’RE MINE,” Mara tells him, and Will feels her words down to his very bones.

He swallows. Licks his lips. “I’m yours,” he chokes out. “Mara, Mara, please – ”

“Hush,” Mara murmurs, her warmth as reassuring and gentle as the stag’s had been suffocating, “I have you, Will. Hush.”

* * *

“I am not helping you play host to that, that snake.”

“Riva,” Hannibal chides. “We do not discriminate against people’s dæmons.”

Riva lets out an inelegant snort, causing a flutter of feathers from where she’d been preening her wings until she noticed Hannibal was making more than his standard one and a half portions for Hannibal and herself. She doesn’t usually pay attention to Hannibal’s dinner preparations, since they’ve long since mutually agreed that the kitchen is Hannibal’s domain and the attic is hers, but it does not take Hannibal this long normally.

“That is not discrimination,” Riva sniffs. “Frederick Chilton is nothing but a harmless snake playing at being a deadly one.”

“Then you should have no trouble playing a gracious host.”

Riva scoffs. While it’s true that dæmons of the same race have a better chance at getting along, there’s also a really big reason that Riva doesn’t generally attend Hannibal’s many soap operas, and only a part of it is maintaining Hannibal’s air of mystery of his dæmon. Riva has no qualms about snapping at dæmons pretending to be that which they are not, and if there was anyone to fit that description, it’s Chilton and his masquerading crow.

“I don’t see why we need him,” Riva says, switching to her other wing.

Hannibal lays out the plates and begins placing each ingredient down with careful intensity. “You know as well as I do that the best laid plans are those with many open options,” Hannibal reminds her. “Besides, I find myself rather curious at the correlation between Frederick Chilton and the supposed Chesapeake Ripper.”

“Curious,” Riva mutters, “or jealous?”

“Riva.”

“Fine! I’m still not attending this butt-kissing dinner.”

“Riva.”

“I’ll stay nearby,” she compromises grumpily, and it takes only a few strokes of her shiny feathers before she concedes to perch on Hannibal’s shoulder and doze as he finishes his preparations. Despite all of her objections, she is still Hannibal’s other half, and she won’t abandon him to the plans he makes for their safety.

Even if she really, really just wants to sit on Chilton’s crow and squash him like a bug.

* * *

“Is it possible you inadvertently planted the suggestion in Gideon's mind that he was The Ripper?” Alana asks, pointed and sweet as a poisoned dagger, and in the back of his mind Hannibal can feel the way Riva chuckles in glee as Chilton’s crow squirms under the pressure.

And it’s not like his human is doing much better; Chilton is already beginning to sweat under Alana’s careful deconstruction.

“You’re not suggesting coercive persuasion,” Chilton stammers.

Alana smiles even more, and at her side, her honey badger preens in the cushioned seat Hannibal provided, content to watch Chilton’s reactions with steady eyes. “No,” she says, “I said inadvertently.”

“Psychic driving is unethical,” Chilton’s crow replies, when it becomes apparent Chilton himself is incapable of defending them from Alana’s assault. “Everyone knows that it is taboo.”

Riva’s eyes gleam in the darkness of her high perch, and Hannibal knows without even looking at her that he’s found his opening. 

“Unethical,” Hannibal remarks, “but reasonable under certain circumstances.”

Chilton takes the lifeline with all the subtlety of a man who cannot swim, and when Hannibal invites him to help with dessert, Chilton shows no shame in fleeing from Alana’s presence. Even his crow follows suit, unnerved by the steady considering gaze of her honey badger, although Chilton is about as unable to protect his dæmon from Alana’s dæmon as his dæmon is a failure at protecting Chilton from other humans.

“Useless,” Riva whispers to Hannibal from her perch.

Hannibal eyes her sternly. Dæmons are reflective of the inner persona of their human. They are the embodiment of what their humans are, not what their humans need, necessarily. Riva is ruthless in her defense of Hannibal, but Chilton’s crow is far less equipped, but that is not a fault of Chilton necessarily.

Chilton is a lamb who prides himself on being a lion, and Hannibal has no regrets for someone who deliberates opens the door to manipulation.

“I promise I am much more forgiving of the unorthodox than Dr. Bloom,” Hannibal concludes, watching the way Chilton stares at him with the greedy eyes of a man who seems more opportunities instead of the quicksand that surrounds them. “Shall we?”

Hook, line, and sinker.

Chilton and his crow float back to the dinner on cloud nine, and at his side, Hannibal feels Riva crooning in victory, eyes gleaming in the darkness.

* * *

“The last call was made to Jack’s cell from a disposable phone traced here,” Beverly says quietly. Her fox dæmon sits quietly at her feet, tail curled neatly around its paws, and Mara dips her head for a friendly exchange of chuffs. 

Mara rarely accompanies him to crime scenes, but after the disaster of the hospital visit, where he’d blacked out, she defiantly blocked his way into the car until he’d given up and opened the backseat up for her. Will isn’t going to admit it, but he does feel more grounded here, with Mara a comforting bulk at his side. And Mara’s getting a thrill of it too, because people usually balk at seeing her and she just loves staring them down.

Except Beverly and Clover, of course. Beverly’s first impulse at seeing Mara had been to exclaim with wonderment at her being an ibex, whilst Clover had slunk up to her and tentatively wagged his tail, offering to play. Mara’s liked Clover ever since.

Will looks at the building in front of them, grey with age and disuse. “Here?”

“Or within a hundred feet of here,” Beverly amends.

It doesn’t really help much. This old observatory is surrounded by trees, fields, and more trees. There really isn’t much here, both in terms of people and civilization and in terms of places where bodies could be secreted and buried without notice. If Miriam Lass came here looking for the Ripper, Will seriously doesn’t understand what she was looking for.

“What was Miriam Lass looking into here?” Mara asks, returning to press against Will’s side.

Beverly shrugs. “Maybe not here. Last I heard, Miriam Lass was looking into medical records. I mean, if the Ripper was a surgeon, she thought he might have treated one of his victims.”

Will scratches Mara’s fur, earning himself a fond nuzzle. Mara rarely speaks, even when he’s around, so he always finds it amazing every time she does speak. To look at her and realize that this is half of his being – the embodiment of his very soul – speaking independently from him, having independent thought, exercising independent free will . . . it always gives Will the shivers and makes him gladder than ever for having Mara at his side.

“Have they retraced her steps?”

“The ones they could find.”

And from her tone, Will can guess exactly where she’s going with it. He sighs and looks back up at the old grey observatory. “And she made a jump somewhere, a jump no one can explain.”

“You make those jumps,” says Clover, his voice as calm and steady as Beverly herself. He’s a brilliant splotch of orange against the bland walkway and the grey building, and a very regal picture to boot. 

Mara snorts. “The evidence has to be there.”

Beverly smiles, because she and Will know all too well that evidence is queen where Beverly is concerned, and she bends down to scoop up Clover and let him curl around her neck like a giant orange fluffy scarf as they start donning the protective boots and gloves. Mara, grumbling angrily, submits to wearing her own boots, but when Clover starts snickering into his tail, she just snaps her teeth at him and subsides.

The laughter ends when they come into contact with Jack, who for once is bereft of his looming bear dæmon. It doesn’t really matter, because Jack launches immediately into talking.

“Every surgeon that came into contact with any of The Ripper victims has been thoroughly vetted or currently under observation,” Jack rumbles.

“Including Dr. Gideon?” 

“Dr. Gideon wasn’t in my bedroom,” Jack snaps, fishing out a phone and brandishing it at them. “The Chesapeake Ripper was. And this last call left something the others didn’t . . . a phone number.”

Jack presses call, and absolute silence falls when they hear the tinny ringing sound from further inside.

Slowly, Jack moves forward, apprehension and fear and hope clashing horribly on his face, followed by Beverly with Clover at attention on her shoulders. Will, though, hangs back. Everything he knows about the Ripper is running through his mind, and he finds himself horrified at his curiosity outweighing his instinctive gut reaction to flee. On one hand, he doesn’t really want to see whatever display the Ripper has made to mock Jack, yet on the other hand, he really wants to see what the Ripper did with the one person who was smart enough to dig him or her out based on the tiniest clue. 

After all, if Jack has his way, he might end up strung up the same way one day.

Mara, thankfully, comes to the rescue.

“I’m here,” she whispers, winding around him so he can ground himself in her warm fur. “I’m here, Will. I’ll never leave you.”

“I might leave you,” Will replies, because he’s done it before. When he sinks into blackout mode, he doesn’t even feel the burning agony of separation as he moves too far from Mara.

Mara nudges him. “And where are you going to go, two-legs? I can outrun you in three seconds flat.”

Will stifles a laugh. It had been her favorite term for him, back before they were old enough to understand the concept of “human” and “dæmon”, and one day Will had gotten so mad he’d actually taken off running, only for Mara to transform into a cheetah and literally leave him coughing in the dust. Mara’s stubbornness has been a fixture of her since day one, and it’s why when she finally settled, Will’s dad had only said, “Well, that’s fitting” instead of anything else.

With that memory to buoy him up, Will moves forward with a confidence that evaporates into confusion when he sees the sight the Ripper has left.

It’s an arm.

_Just_ an arm, clutching a phone, with a faint sprinkling of golden dust all over the scene.

Jack is pale, frozen mid-step, but Beverly moves forward with a frown as Clover takes deep inhales. “Frozen,” Clover announces. “This arm has been frozen and unfrozen several times. That will keep us from determining if she was alive when the arm was severed.”

“And how long,” Beverly adds with a sigh. “Damn it.”

Will closes his eyes and tries to let the pendulum swing, but nothing happens. The Ripper has left him, for once, with just the barest taste of his intent, like someone giving a thread and asking the person to name the tapestry from whence it came. He can’t make out heads or tails, except of course things that he already knows: the Ripper is sadistic, clever, meticulous, and taunting. 

The phone – a bait for a bait. The FBI used Tattlecrime; the Ripper uses a voice from the past.

The left arm – an insult for an insult. The FBI dared to insult his intelligence by thinking he’d respond to such obvious bait; the Ripper now insults their science with an arm they can’t get any new information out of.

And the golden dust – well. When a dæmon passes, they tend to implode into a cloud of golden dust. The dust itself is rather impossible to gather or dissect or study, so here it is symbolic, but still just as terrifying.

The Ripper murdered Miriam Lass, and he or she deliberately went out of their way to collect golden dust to mock the FBI at their inability to prevent her death or catch the Ripper. And without her skull, they can’t even bury her the proper way, with a coin slipped in her mouth carved with the name of her dæmon, so that they can pass into death together, soul and body reunited in death. 

When Will opens his eyes, Jack is staring at him, but Will has nothing to offer.

“The Ripper respected Miriam Lass,” is all Will can say. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to get the dust. He crushes and mocks the dæmons of his typical victims. He’s showing that he can do new things even with old ideas, the way Abel Gideon never could have.”

“That’s it?” Jack bellows.

Mara steps around Will, and Will curls his fingers in her comforting fur as she takes control, vibrant and regal in her anger. “We are not alethiometrists, Crawford,” Mara says, her low voice a distinct and cutting contrast. “The Ripper is trying to demonstrate that he is better than Abel Gideon; the best, in fact. Today he is, and Miriam Lass is dead. Leave her in the past, where she belongs, and look to the future. We will catch the Ripper one day. Today is simply not that day.”

Will can practically see the confusion radiate across Jack’s face, because he’s rarely ever seen Mara and definitely never heard her speak, but today the confusion works in their benefit.

Jack waves them off, and the forensics teams descend.

* * *

After Jack leaves, drooping with the sadness of a long-burning hope crushed beneath the press of years and terrible thoughts, Riva flutters to Hannibal’s shoulder from her high perch.

“Well, that was dramatic,” she says.

Hannibal strokes her feathers, reveling in the feel of her against his skin. Riva is not a particularly tactile dæmon, thanks to the years they spent honing their skill at controlling every facet of who they were and who they appeared to be, so it is nice when she comes to him of her own accord just to feel one with him again. 

“Miriam was a very brave young woman,” Hannibal remarks.

Riva chirps. “I remember.”

Hannibal remembers too, very vividly. And not because Miriam Lass was the first person to ever make the connection of the last piece of evidence he thought he had buried too well to ever be discovered.

He remembers because it had been the first time that Riva had struck first, dæmon against human, shocking everyone so much that it had given Hannibal the necessary time to get the upper hand and strangle Miriam Lass into unconsciousness. The second she had discovered his drawings, Riva had dove down from the ceiling with a screech, plummeting with her wings tucked and her beak sharp, colliding into Miriam Lass and making the trainee scream and jump back, flustered, until Hannibal had closed his hands around her vulnerable thought whilst Riva scooped up her panicking chipmunk dæmon in her claws.

Riva had been a very vocal advocate for immediate death, and it had taken a long, long time for Hannibal to convince her otherwise.

“I still don’t like it,” Riva says grumpily.

“It has worked out in our favor so far. Poor Uncle Jack is now far too riled up to realize the answer is sitting right on front of his nose. Add that to the burden of his wife’s condition, and I doubt he will be capable of putting any puzzle piece together, much less following the true tail of Miriam Lass.”

Riva fluffs her wings. “I felt her, and she me,” she murmurs. “I touched another human, Hannibal, and let them feel everything that we are. I do not like that she lives still with that tucked away in her memory.”

“Do you doubt my ability to restructure her mind?”

“I think,” Riva says, “that you are rapidly becoming obsessed with Will Graham.”

“I thought you liked Will.”

“I do like Will. I like our freedom more.”

“Ruthless,” Hannibal chides, but he smiles as he does it. Riva is his anchor in the deep, his beacon and his guardian, willing to do anything to keep him safe. He would be lost without her in more ways than one. “Very well. I promise that no matter what happens with Will Graham, I will not release Miriam Lass until I am absolutely certain she contains no memory of her last visit with us. Agreeable?”

It will involve pushing back his timetable a little bit, but more time to play with Miriam’s mind won’t go amiss. And it will give him more time to compare and contrast his treatment and the reactions of it to those he is giving to Will during their sessions.

“Obsessed,” Riva sing-songs, and when he begins to protest she flies away, cackling in glee, and he smiles, disagreement resolved.

* * *

“You’re keeping secrets from us,” the ibex observes as she approaches.

“Oh? Am I?”

The ibex snorts and gives up; holding a cloud would be easier than prying open the beak of the magpie. “I’m surprised dear old Uncle Jack didn’t call upon you and your doctor to examine the crime scene the Ripper left behind.”

“What crime scene?” the magpie asks, because appearances are important and sometimes the littlest nagging doubts can end up being the worst problems. 

Case in point: Miriam Lass and her tiny hunch.

“Never mind,” the ibex sighs. “It’s good to see you, anyways.”

The magpie risks a hop closer, but no further. Still they have not touched, although they both know the other wants to, but they each have secrets to hold back, for their humans’ sakes.

“Sleep well,” the magpie says instead, so she does not blurt out her true desires. _Come here, hold me, touch me, know me._

“Sleep well,” the ibex echoes. _Keep me, love me, never let me go._

And with that they part again, their humans none the wiser.

“How was your flight?” Hannibal asks, and Riva merely settles in her nest, kneading her blankets with a satisfied melody humming in her throat.

“God, you’re cold, how far did you walk?” Will demands, and Mara merely flops down by their bed, greeting their pack and yawning as her human gives up and just settles into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized as I was heading towards the end of this that I never really explained what dæmons are or the significance of the golden dust I was referring to last chapter, so for anyone who doesn't know and has still stuck with me through this: dæmons are the living embodiment of a human soul, like we carry ours around inside and in this world they walk outside the body in an animal form. When a human dies, their dæmon sorta explodes into a puff of golden dust. Or course, you can also kill a dæmon and the human will die too, but usually the human dies first because it's taboo to touch someone else's dæmon. For more information, feel free to leave me comments down below or read [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_\(His_Dark_Materials\)) for some basics.
> 
> Aaaand we're almost at the end of my take on season 1, folks! Tune in next time for Chapter 5: "for this is how i turn over a New murder".


	5. for this is how i turn over a New murder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Matthew Brown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter title is a play on the idea of "turning over a new leaf". Or it was. It sorta kinda fits.

Will feels a constant itch every single day he spends in the tender care of the BSHCI. Most of this itch is dedicated to the new level of clarity he has, now that the fog has been lifted from his eyes. He knows exactly why he’s being accused of being the Copycat Killer and exactly who is at fault, and although he knows he’s playing right into Hannibal’s hands, he still makes an effort to look the monster of his nightmares in the eyes and let him know _his_ mistake for allowing Will to finally receive treatment and understand who he is.

The other half of the itch is, of course, Mara.

See, the problem with being held in a hospital for the criminally insane is that when humans go insane, often their dæmons do too. So dæmons are often held far, far away from their humans, in the hopes that the constant pain will keep either party from doing anything rash like trying to escape.

Mara’s saner than Will ever was, so she has the wits about her to submit to her imprisonment with grace, but that doesn’t mean she and Will aren’t still waking up every day in pain from the forced separation. Every single day, Will can feel Mara’s urge to kick through her containment cell and come to him, rules be damned, and every single day he has to talk her out of it.

After all, although intercision was successfully proven unable to treat mental illness, it’s still an effective way to lobotomize someone without resorting to lobotomy. 

Will is not going to lose Mara and his mind to intercision. He is going to get out and make sure that Hannibal knows exactly the kind of pain he feels, with all the world to see him for exactly who and what he is.

That’s not to say it doesn’t cut him when Beverly visits and Clover won’t even look at him. But Will just takes a deep breath and gets on with it. He’s going through his trial by fire, both literally considering his brain was on fire and figuratively given that everyone he’s ever known is busily trying to paint him as a sadistic murderer, and he knows best of all that once you start down the gauntlet, you have to finish it.

He does his duty – looks at the photographs, gives what answers he can, goes back to his cell like a good little prisoner. He sits quietly, he eats what he little he can, he causes no trouble.

All the while, he plans.

And sure enough, it doesn’t take long for Chilton to come knocking on his door, begging for scraps. It’s all too easy to lure him in with a few well-placed words and ideas, and although Mara worries in the corner of his mind, it’s Will’s turn to be stubborn and dig his heels in. 

He has to understand how Hannibal got in, and right now Chilton’s his best bet for that, since Hannibal sure as hell isn’t going admit to anything. Not here, in this prison with high towers and walls with ears. 

Of course, that’s not to say Chilton’s a complete idiot. After they’ve strapped Will in, he arrives with his pompous cane and his pompous perch for his crow and a pompous grin with a form in hand, the same way an enemy comes to a truce with a treaty in one hand to hide the poisoned dagger in the other. 

“Before I start asking you questions,” Chilton says, fiddling with his obnoxious cane with a smug little smile, “I need some confidence that you will be telling the truth when you answer.”

_Aw, you don’t trust me?_ Will wants to say.

Mara says, _Shut up, Will._

So Will asks instead, “What’s this?”

“A consent form. You’re agreeing to a narcoanalytic interview. You. Me.” He inclines his head at the waiting orderly, who immediately reaches for Will’s restrained arms and the veins contained therein. Will had been wondering how many would be witness to his humiliation. “And our old friend, sodium amytal.”

Will can’t help the derisive snort at that. “A little something to loosen my tongue?” he taunts, because he knows better than anyone just how much his silence has riled Chilton. And not just his silence since being imprisoned and evaluated here. He’s been pushing Chilton off for a long, long, long time, and Chilton’s throwing down the gauntlet like it’s the smoking gun, the magic spell that’s going to make Will crack right open and reveal all of his deepest, darkest secrets for Chilton to rake in and write down and make big money off of.

Chilton’s crow shifts on her perch. Will’s tone has gotten to her.

Good.

“Something lawfully used in the evaluation of psychotic patients,” replies the crow, fluffing her wings as if trying to appear bigger.

Which, okay, fine. There’s just one or two or a dozen problems with that. For one thing, sodium amytal can loosen a person’s tongue and make them more susceptible to suggestion or talking. What it cannot do is completely override a person’s inhibitions, especially someone like Will, who’s had years and years to build up inhibitions.

Secondly, this isn’t Will’s first rodeo with sodium amytal. Maybe it won’t be exactly the same, but Will’s has experience on what to do and not to do. Not that he plans on sharing such information with Chilton, of course.

Thirdly, and most importantly: Will is not entering this trance to discover what Hannibal did to him. At least, not personally. He’s not stupid. Hannibal slipped through his defenses and made a mockery of his walls. He didn’t see the slimy monster crawling in and he doubts he’d be any better at seeing the man’s fingerprints now under the influence of drugs than he was when he was clearheaded, before he met Hannibal Lecter and everything went crazy.

Will is entering this trance so _Mara_ can find out what this intruder has done to them. 

Because if there’s one thing Chilton is forgetting, it is that human and dæmon are one. They do not physically exist as one, but at the core of them, they share the same beating heart, the same glowing soul, the same restless mind. And with the aid of drugs, it becomes even easier to get lost in the blurred lines between soul and body. Will is just going to lean back and let Mara swallow him whole, and she is going to find out exactly what the mice do when the cats are away.

Or, more precisely, what Chesapeake Ripper human suit wearing psychiatrists do when rational thinking has been kidnapped by encephalitis. 

“What would you use to induce memory loss in a patient, psychotic or otherwise?” Will inquiries, to break the monotony of Chilton fiddling with his expensive cane and the orderly breathing all over Will’s personal space.

Chilton looks up and pastes on a smile, as if to say, _Okay, I’ll help you, and you’ll help me._ It’s a terrible fake, but Will lets it pass, because hey, he _is_ curious.

“The protein synthesis that moves memories from short-term to long-term can be interrupted,” Chilton answers slowly, “but that requires tools and skills. And a certain level of . . . unorthodoxy.”

And if there’s a word to describe Hannibal, it’s unorthodox. 

Will sighs. Sometimes he really isn’t sure if he wants to applaud Hannibal’s handiwork or kick the man in the nuts. Although perhaps a lot of nut-kicking desire stems from Mara, who dearly wishes to utilize her very strong and sharp horns on some very private and sensitive areas, because Mara is a dear and also protective and also rather irritated right now with the entire world.

“Does Hannibal Lecter possess those tools and skills?” Will says, because one day the recording of this session is going to examined and Will wants to lay the groundwork for all the idiots who are going to miss every clue he’s laying out for them so that he can come back later and slap them all up the head.

Chilton wets his lips. “Dr. Lecter has indicated to me that he is . . . open . . . to the unorthodox when it comes to treating patients.”

If Will had ears, they would have pricked up right then and there. In either case, Mara’s ears definitely go right up, although she immediately lowers them back down so as not to alarm the orderlies that are definitely watching them both right now.

_Well, at least we know Hannibal’s back-up back up plan,_ Mara says.

_Better with honey than vinegar,_ Will replies.

Mara snorts. _Lecter just wants a pasty he doesn’t have to expend too much energy to frame. And here is one practically gift-wrapped for him with an “I’m the Ripper!” sticker on it for him._

_Mara_.

_Do you disagree?_

_I think you should focus on getting into my head._

_Oh, Will,_ Mara says, so warm Will can practically feel the comforting weight of her fur against his fingers. _I am_ always _in your head._

Hastily, because Chilton’s starting to stare at them and Will doesn’t need a new chapter subtitled “Unnatural Abilities Between Will Graham and His Dæmon”, Will says, “I wonder how that subject came up . . .”

“Sharing stories of the unorthodox,” Chilton says sweetly, as though Will’s an object and not a semi-functioning person. “Sign here.”

Will does, with a flourish, and then sits back to let his one true soul flood into his mind.

* * *

When he comes back, gasping and covered in sweat and heart racing as though he’s run a marathon, Mara is practically frothing at the mouth, so mad that the sun is red and making their calm little stream more like a raging floodzone.

“What? Mara, what?”

Mara rams into a tree, so furious she’s spitting steam, and when the tree falls, she rams another and another and another, until finally her anger is mostly spent.

“He was inducing seizures.”

“What?” says Will, because seriously, what?

“He was encouraging them. The blackouts. The lost time,” Mara spits, her hooves leaving deep weeping furrows in the grass with each pass of her legs as she stomps around Will. “It was strategic. It was planned. It was – Will, _he set us up_.”

“I knew that.”

“No, he set this up with us in mind. You and me, specifically.”

Will sighs and lays back on the grass. The red sun has given all the clouds a strange pink halo, and it would be cute except this is the angriest neon pink he’s ever seen, like if blood got really hyper and decided to change color just to mess with people’s minds. He would be angry, but there’s only so much anger one soul can have, and Mara’s plenty angry as it is. 

“So much for being friends,” Will muses.

Mara circles him once more, still snorting, before finally curling around his head, her breaths hot and heavy against his forehead. They used to lie the exact same way in real life, when Will wanted to sleep in between fishing and Mara got tired of wading through the stream.

Will reaches up and curls his fingers into her fur. “What are we going to do now?”

Because in all honesty, Mara is the true planner of the two of them. It was Mara who discovered how best to hide bruises and cuts from the overzealous teachers and nurses of his youth. It was Mara who found a way to quietly but firmly shut the door on his father after years and years of abuse when they fled to college. It was Mara who nudged and prodded and poked Will into resigning from the police force and moving up to Wolf Trap. Mara has never let Will down, and Will knows that Mara has about a thousand plans of what to do moving forward, which is good, because Will’s future plans are currently: get out prison and get the hell away from Hannibal, the FBI, and Virginia itself.

“I’m going to use my horns to cut off his – ”

“Mara.”

Mara licks at his hand, warm and reassuring. “An eye for an eye,” Mara says quietly. “Just like the old days Hannibal’s always talking about.”

Will closes his eyes and thinks of an orderly with short hair and piercing eyes, who never loses a chance to be the orderly on duty when they let him awkwardly sponge bath in the showers, who always lingers overlong whilst putting the chains on Will, who openly ogled Will when he got dressed in a suit for court.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Will says.

Mara stands over him, and for a second, Will can’t tell if he’s looking at the horns of his dæmon or his demon.

“Let me,” Mara murmurs. “Let me do this for us.”

Will reaches up and grasps at her horns, solid and polished and heavy, a fixture in his salvation and his damnation both. Without her, he would slide away down the stream, forever lost to the tides of the thousand of greedy minds of killers threatening to swallow him up, but Mara is the unmovable anchor to his unstoppable imagination, and she – unlike it – has free will of her own to utilize as she wishes.

Will says, “Okay.”

The next thing the orderly comes to deliver food, Will doesn’t ignore him and sit in the corner and wade into his stream. He looks up. Takes the tray. Says, “Thank you, Matthew.”

The orderly does a double-take. Then he grins, a sly slow thing, and in the back of Will’s mind, Mara purrs, _Excellent._

* * *

Before Will and the ibex, Hannibal had never noticed how . . . routine his life had become. He’d sworn once to never be predictable, not truly, for to be predictable was to be prey, but he kept up certain appearances to blend in with the sheep. Still, he altered a few key things here and there, because Riva forever worries.

Nowadays, he finds himself constantly failing to leave the office after his last appointment, forever staring at the blank page where a tiny note in his own hand reminds me that his typical schedule includes a certain Will Graham.

Riva fetches him, the first time, feathers ruffled. “I’m hungry,” she says.

Hannibal strokes her shiny feathers, transferring her neatly from shoulder to desk as he dons his coat and scarf. She looks remarkably out of place with her black and white feathers against the plain white papers that hold his drawings and his beautiful desk, but Hannibal ordered the desk to blend in, not for Riva. Riva, if she stays, perches high in the ceiling, ever watchful and waiting for something to go wrong.

“Your kind does not eat as we do,” Hannibal replies, amused, for the first time he had cooked a portion for her as well she had scoffed at him.

Riva chirps. “As your appetite as grown,” Riva comments, “so has mine. We are one and the same.”

To make up for it, that night he had prepared an elaborate dinner, beyond his normal standards, and Riva had thanked him by not taking her typical nightly flight and instead settling down before him, kneading her blankets and drifting off nearby, instead of forcing him to bear the endless tugs as she stretched their bond to the very limits.

However, nowadays, Riva does not fetch him. She is mourning too, he knows, but in her own way, and they do not interrupt each other.

Besides, he is not just mourning the loss of Will Graham.

He mourns too the little ibex, who after a string of regular visits through the patio door, no longer comes to visit him. The last time, she had come right up to him, nosing gently at his vest, and he’d nearly fainted from holding his breath so long at the closeness of her. She’d dozed, legs folded and tail twitching, in front of the fireplace for the longest time, and for a while he had hoped she would stay.

Now, she does not even come at all.

Now, Hannibal sits by the fireplace and drinks his wine alone. It pains him, to be separated from the chrysalis he is honing, and although he knows it cannot be helped – for Will was getting close, too close – it does not help the pain that twinges in his chest. He keeps himself busy as best he can, but he finds that unfortunately all the operas in the world are less beautiful without the breath of fresh air and color that Will interjected into the entire picture that makes up his life’s work.

Riva flutters in, one late night and half a bottle of wine later.

“You have done what it necessary,” she says, her claws a distinct disapproving clink against the bottle resting in the empty chair.

Hannibal takes another long swallow. “I protected us. That does not mean that I am . . . without regrets.”

Riva blinks, and for a moment she is as alien to him as she is to the magpies whose appearance she takes on. “What is exactly that you are mourning, Hannibal? You have done much worse to those who sought to reveal us.”

“Miriam Lass is not Will Graham.”

Riva shifts, feathers fluttering. Hannibal can tell that his response has taken her aback; apparently she was not thinking of the trainee who nearly found them and the chipmunk she nearly swallowed in a bid to protect their freedom. He wonders, in turn, what exactly she is mourning.

“And what are you mourning, Riva?” Hannibal gestures to her feathers, where a worry spot has begun to form from over-preening.

“Possibility,” Riva murmurs. “A chance. Perhaps a fool’s one.”

Hannibal sets down his glass. Riva almost never speaks in riddles. At least, not to him. She is half of him and he is half of her. To attempt to keep secrets is useless. He tried, oh how hard he tried, to protect her and push her away, when he left Paris to track down the pigs who had butchered his family and sister. In the end, he found that he had fooled her not the slightest, and he had only succeeded in leaving her behind because he had had the foresight to trap her in a cage she could not escape in time to catch him.

“You,” Hannibal says, “are trying to keep secrets from me.”

Riva laughs, a sharp hoarse sound, so dissonant with the fuzzy edges of Hannibal’s mind. “Yes, I am,” she admits baldly. “But so are you. When were you going to tell me that Will had encephalitis, Hannibal? When his brain had burnt out like a dying sun and only ash and embers and dust were left?”

“I would not have let it get that far.”

“Are you sure,” Riva says, and it is not at all a question.

And to be perfectly fair . . . Hannibal does not have an answer. In the beginning, the first time he had smelled the infection, he truly does not know whether he ever meant to let Will reach treatment in time. Will shone so brightly that a supernova would have been a fitting end, for the Hannibal of then, and he would have enjoyed whatever fleeting joy Will would have given him in the meantime as the fever consumed everything in its path.

“Enough,” Hannibal says sharply. “What’s done is done. What are you hiding, Riva?”

“That depends,” Riva replies. “When are you planning to tell me how you mean to free Will from prison?”

“I was not aware that such trivial plans interested you.”

“Then I was not aware that my own trivial day to day flights interested you,” Riva retorts, and with a flutter of wings and a rush of air, she is gone, out of the door before he can even stand.

A flash of anger jolts through Hannibal, and for a long moment, he cannot tell if it is from him or from Riva.

Maybe it does not matter.

* * *

Hannibal seeks solace in swimming, to clear his mind and to exercise his body. He chooses a great deal of his hobbies like that, to keep his mind sharp and his body fit in order to carry out whatever he chooses, and it has the added benefit of giving him alone time without Riva. Riva dislikes the sharp smell of chlorine and, as a winged dæmon, dislikes even more the thought of being grounded by wet feathers, so she rarely accompanies him when he chooses to take up swimming.

It is both deliberate and petty, and Hannibal knows it and he knows that Riva knows he knows it, but sometimes, pettiness is a bolder and truer statement that anything covered with icing and sauce.

He blames this pettiness as the reason for why he fails to notice the true danger of the weasel that pops up near the edge, curled up and watching with beady eyes. 

Hannibal wakes up bound to a rough cross, an unsteady bucket beneath his toes and a coarse noose around his neck. His arms ache from the binding and the deep cuts that line his forearms, and his head spins from whatever drugs were in the dart that had buried deep in his breast and left him helpless and sinking in the water.

“Judas had the decency to hang himself in shame at his betrayals. But I thought you’d need help.”

The voice, Hannibal finds, is a disappointment. For a moment, hope had risen in him, that finally he would witness the glorious becoming of the chrysalis he had so carefully tended – but then reason had returned, for if Will had escaped a second time, he would have been told.

This is not Will Graham’s voice. 

But, perhaps, he reasons, this is his doing, if a flawed execution of his vision. Will would never be so messy as to allow Hannibal any help.

The man that strolls into view is as disappointing as his voice. His weasel, upon closer inspection, is thin and starved and ravenous, unable to control the inner instincts that now prey upon its human, and they are the weaker pair for it. Still, he continues to speak. “Did you know that the phrase ‘to kick the bucket’ came from exactly this situation? You could kick it away now yourself and it’d all be over. Quicker than bleeding out,” the man says, although Hannibal can tell that it’s not what the man wants to see. “It’s a choice. Life is about choices. Good choices.” Pause. “Bad choices.”

Hannibal coughs. “Hobson’s choice. Another old phrase.” He eyes the man’s demeanor, his stance, how he moves. The medical knowledge to slit the arms and to access to gather the drugs. He comes to a quick conclusion. “You’re a nurse at the hospital. Are you Will Graham's admirer?”

“We have a mutual respect,” the man says with a sharp grin, all teeth and no subtlety. 

“Will’s not what you think he is,” Hannibal remarks, for the benefit of the cameras surely recording this conversation. “He’s not a murderer.” _Sadly,_ he adds, in the privacy of his own mind.

It doesn’t seem to bother the man anyway. He only shrugs. “He is now. At least by proxy.”

For a moment, the word doesn’t register. 

And then it does – proxy, meaning surrogate, meaning stand-in, meaning representative. And, well, anything that represents Will is always of interest of Hannibal, slippery bucket and all.

“He asked you to do this?”

“What are friends for?”

Hannibal nearly slips off the bucket at that. He wants to say, _Will Graham does not have friends._ He wants to say, _Will Graham does not ask such things of friends._ He wants to say, _Will Graham is my friend, not yours._ But the words don’t come. Mostly because of the situation, but also because he’s distracted by the burning rage that ignites in his chest.

Riva.

She is coming.

Annoyingly, the orderly is still talking. “Now I’m going to ask you a few yes-or-no questions while you still have enough blood coursing through your brain to answer them,” he says carelessly, his weasel yawning at his feet. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Did you,” the orderly starts dramatically, hands on hips like an actor pretending to be a committed lawyer, “kill that judge?”

Hannibal does not answer. It’s both a challenge to his authority and a test of his capability, and he finds himself rather curious to see what this “friend” of Will’s will do. After all, Will draws many interesting individuals to himself, and he wonders which part of Will echoes in this choice of friend. This man will die, of course, but it’s always fun to play with the mice. 

“I can ask you yes-or-no questions, you don’t have to say a word and I'll know what the answer is,” the man sing-songs, echoing against the gentle waves. “The pupil dilates with specific mental efforts. You dilate, that's a ‘yes’. No dilation equals ‘no’.”

Strike one in his favor, Hannibal notes. Risky, to do little research about one’s target, else this one would already know that Hannibal already knows this information.

The man smiles a little bigger, and this time his weasel sits up with attention. “Are you,” he says dramatically, “the Chesapeake Ripper?”

Hannibal, again, does not answer.

He does not really need to. This man has already decided, after seeing the way Hannibal moves in the swimming pool and his responses to earlier questions. Nothing Hannibal says will change his mind, and Hannibal sees no point in wasting precious breath as he scrabbles for balance and purchase on the bucket slippery with his own falling blood. 

“Look at you,” the man breathes, wonder in his eyes like little pinpricks of stars. “The Chesapeake Ripper.”

The bucket nearly slips again. Riva is both closer and even angrier, and it brings joy to Hannibal’s heart to feel the way she pushes herself, bringing them ever closer. He never thought she would have abandoned him, but it’s still nice to receive proof.

_Soon, Hannibal,_ Riva says. _Soon, and I will peck his eyes out myself._

_Perhaps his tongue first,_ Hannibal replies, because the man is still talking even though it’s clear Hannibal does not care at all.

“Wonder what they’ll call me. The Iroquois used to eat their enemies to take their strength. Maybe your murders become my murders. I’ll be the Chesapeake Ripper now.”

And, well, now, that’s just rude.

Hannibal’s many, many, many kills are his alone. He trained alone, he hunted alone, he ate alone. They are his kills alone, because he found them and slaughtered them and ripped meat from bone with his own two hands. He carries them all with him, and no usurper can take that from him with mere wood and rope.

Hannibal says, “Only if you eat me.”

The weasel and man hiss as once. Perhaps they did not consider the true meaning of their little story. Pity.

They won’t be able to tell another.

“He’s got a gun!” Hannibal shouts, half for Jack and half for Riva, as both burst into the scene at the fastest speed Hannibal’s ever seen, Jack sprinting for the orderly and Riva diving in a silent deadly fall towards the weasel. Fortunately, Jack takes his warning at his word and just shoots, and as the orderly falls, Riva snatches up the weasel and sticks her sharp beak in its neck, brutal and unforgiving as it squeals and wriggles in her piercing talons. She pokes and rips and tears until the dæmon gives out with a cry, imploding into golden dust, and Hannibal breathes anew as Jack restrains the orderly.

After that, everything happens very quickly. A pale Alana dials for an ambulance as Riva snaps the rope and Jack helps him down, and afterwards, Riva curls into the crook of his neck and makes a go at any EMT foolish enough to bring fingers close to his neck.

“I am alive,” Hannibal says, for the benefit of the paramedics.

Riva cuffs him with a wing. “You nearly _died_ ,” she shrieks. “I leave you behind for half an hour, HALF AN HOUR, and you nearly die on me!”

“That was not my intention.”

“I am going to make a nest on your head,” she threatens.

“Riva.”

“I’ll even use your fanciest handkerchiefs and most precious socks.”

“Riva – ”

“I’ll rip a hole in your – ”

“Riva!” Hannibal says, raising his voice to her for the first time in many, many years. “Riva. I am alive. You are alive. We are together. Is that not all that matters?”

Riva pecks him, hard enough to draw blood, but there’s a raw satisfaction in her move. Riva alone has the right to draw blood from him, and the sharp cleansing pain of her beak draws away the unpleasant memory of the orderly wrapping a rope with his unworthy hands around Hannibal’s neck.

“You. Are. Mine.”

“So I am,” Hannibal murmurs, and strokes her shiny, ruffled feathers. “So I am.”

Later, in the peace of their home, Riva will nestle by his head and concede. “Very well,” she says, soft and slurred with sleep. “I admit that you were right. We should move forward with our plans to free Will Graham.”

“He will not be able to make such an attempt on our lives again,” Hannibal replies immediately, automatically wary. Riva never concedes an argument so easily.

Riva blinks slowly at him. “Perhaps,” she murmurs wryly, “I have missed Will too.”

Hannibal looks at the other half of his soul and wonders anew how much she can surprise him. Besides Will and Mischa and the ibex, no one else has ever managed to take him off guard quite like Riva can. Although, to be fair, maybe part of their argument was their failure to simply see the plainest truth out there: they both miss Will Graham and they both wish to remain free. Together, and only together, can they achieve both.

And, also, to be fair, Riva has an advantage over all the others as well.

“You will help me.”

“Yes, Hannibal. I will help you.”

* * *

Far away in a cold forest, a magpie sits on a branch and sings alone, forlorn and soft and wanting. She misses her companion, and she sings of reunion, of freedom, of wanting and loving and having forever.

Deep in the basement of a prison, an ibex lifts her ears and listens to the magpie’s song. But she does not sing back and she does not join the magpie. 

Sometimes, even souls have jagged edges and painful grudges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're at the halfway point, folks! I plan to make this about ten chapters, sooo only five more to go. Chapter 6 will be titled: "for the question is to Stab or not to stab".
> 
> Side note: Riva and Hannibal are both hypocrites in this chapter, as they're both hiding things from each other and trying to out-maneuver the other, but what really drove the conflict for them was [this meta post](http://thesilverqueenlady.tumblr.com/post/153408486949/bonearenaofmyskull-stickmarionette) about why Hannibal misses Will, which really inspired the back half of this chapter.
> 
> Also, sincere thanks to the lovely JoJa, who made me laugh with [this fabulous Riva picture](http://thesilverqueenlady.tumblr.com/post/153430746629/petimetrek-borb-thesilverqueenlady-biep).


	6. for the question is to Stab or not to stab

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter TEARS - I mean, Mizumono

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What can I say, I was feeling particularly Shakespearean-ish the day I wrote this. Shakespeare-ish? Whatever, the title is a reference to the overused Shakespeare quote. (And as someone who spent an entire fscking school year studying Shakespeare, I realize I'm really bending the metaphor but this has also used up my limited will to discuss Shakespeare again soooo ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯)
> 
> Also, Happy Thanksgiving to those of my readers who celebrate it, and those who don't . . . well, it's almost no longer Thanksgiving anyways and to those of you in Europe and Asia, it's well into Friday anyways, so just enjoy another chapter because :D

Will is minding his own business, tidying up the seemingly never-ending mess that the FBI left behind when they locked him up, when Mara nudges him in the back.

“Gimme a minute.”

Mara’s answering snort is a little muffled, which Will understands when he turns around.

Carried gently behind her teeth, shiny and sharp, is a whittling knife. Collapsible, good quality, sturdy. It had been a gift from Will’s partner on the force, until he died when the man Will failed to shoot killed him and then shot Will in the arm. Will had nearly thrown it out, actually, but Mara had blocked the trashcan and stared him down until he finally tucked it away in some old socks, determined to never look at it again.

Actually, Will’s not quite sure where the whittling knife had ended up all those years ago, but apparently Mara kept track.

Mara stomps impatiently, so Will automatically opens a hand and she drops the knife in it.

“I have a gun,” Will remarks.

Mara just looks at him. “So you did,” she says. “And a fat lot of good that did you when Hannibal was in front of you.”

“You told me not to kill him!” Will exclaims, because it’s true. He’d stood in Hannibal’s kitchen, gun steady and familiar in his hands, a kill-shot straight through Hannibal’s messy, terrifying, beautiful mind, and Mara had kicked down the doors to his mind to stop him, so forceful Will had nearly pulled the trigger by accident out of shock. He’d let that burst of motion be intimidating instead, smoothing it into a fierce step forward and relishing the adrenaline rush of seeing Hannibal turn his head, close his eyes, bare his throat and stand still, his prisoner at that moment, but he’d still left Hannibal alive and perfectly functioning.

“I know self-defense,” Mara says. “And so does Jack and everyone else who saw Hannibal testify so strongly for you. We need a kill in self-defense.”

“Are you saying I should provoke Chesapeake Ripper into trying to kill me? Because then I might actually die, you realize.”

Mara sighs and nuzzles into his skin, warm and comforting and weary behind her years. She’s more of a parent to him than either his drunk father or whoever his mother was, and sometimes he regrets that. They grew up fast. Possibly too fast. Sometimes, in his dark moments, Will wonders if that’s why he was so blind to Hannibal’s machinations, trusting in an authority figure to protect him just to lift the burden of protection from Mara’s shoulders.

“I sent a killer after Hannibal,” Mara says eventually, slow and tired. “Hannibal will not forgive that, and he will not forget. You must be ready for whatever retaliation he sends.”

Will deliberately does not look at the sink, where his worst hallucination actually turned out to be true. Instead he closes his hand around the whittling knife, so small but so easily fatal, if used just in the right way. 

“Hannibal already took his payment,” Will murmurs. “In blood and flesh.”

“No, Will. Abigail Hobbs was payment for her own secrets, not for you. Hannibal will take action against you for what I did.”

Will hugs her and strokes her fur. He’s mostly recovered from his ordeal in the BSHCI, his bruises healed, his belongings restored, his bank account flush with apology and don’t-sue-us money. He spends day after day walking with his pack, soaking up the sun to reinvigorate his skin, and filling his belly with Hannibal’s delicious meals, taking full advantage of what Hannibal is so willing to offer.

Mara, though.

Mara has not recovered so easily. Her sleep is restless and her fur is still patchy in places where the restraints rubbed sores into her skin and sometimes loud noises still startle her into full retreat. She takes long walks as well, but not for calm. Mara plans and thinks and takes out her anger.

Will takes a deep breath and looks deep into Mara’s eyes. “What we did,” Will declares. “We sent Matthew Brown after Hannibal. And we will suffer the consequences of whatever Hannibal does next. Together.”

“I,” Mara says, “am meant to protect you.”

“No, Mara,” Will replies, kissing her twitching nose, “we are two halves of one being. We are meant to protect each other.”

* * *

Randall Tier’s dæmon balloons in size the second he catches sight of Riva, swooping in ahead of Hannibal, swelling from a tiny inconspicuous mouse to a full-fledged enormous lion. Riva does not flinch, though, and neither does Hannibal. He’s a little surprised that the dæmon hasn’t settled, but perhaps that it is to be accounted for; Randall Tier was well into puberty when Hannibal treated him and even back then his dæmon showed no signs of settling.

“Doctor Lecter.”

“Hello, Randall,” Hannibal says, and nothing else. Randall always did feel a stronger connection to Riva, animal in her fierceness, than he ever did with Hannibal.

Riva chirps a soft greeting and flutters down to perch on an enormous skull. “You will always be ruled by your fascination with teeth,” she says, half chiding, half noting.

Randall pauses, and his lion swishes his tail and pads slowly closer. “That’s what you said to me when they brought in your office the very first time,” he murmurs, like a man awakening from a long sleep.

“Is it?”

“Yeah. I – I was crying. I was dreading telling you what was wrong with me and . . . you made it easier.” Randall’s face is rapturous, like a worshipping pilgrim with his face upturned to the glory of a god. “Other visits too.”

Riva preens behind his glow. She rarely speaks during his appointments, dismissing most of his patients as dull or annoying, so Randall was the first one where she showed genuine interest apart from the interest Hannibal himself felt. When Hannibal’s words had failed, she had fluttered down and spoken, and Randall had been spellbound ever since.

“A therapist’s life is equal parts counsel and curiosity,” Hannibal remarks, eyeing the lion dæmon as it blurs from a lion to a mouse to a jaguar, always shifting, always moving. “We set a patient on a path, but are left to wonder where that path will take them.”

“You’ve come so very far, Randall,” Riva says, sweet and soft, praise falling from her like honey from the sky. Unexpected but still so addicting.

“A long time since you treated me.”

“Which is why I wanted to talk to you about your wonderful progress, just for a moment, privately,” Riva says, stern now, as the honey hardens under the glare of the sun. Hannibal steps back, falling into the careful choreography they’ve always used around this animal-boy, give and take and forward and back, every move carefully planned. “I’ve seen what you’ve done.”

The dæmon, now a skunk, speaks from the floor, voice low and sweet, like a man-child. “What have I done?” he asks, sing-song.

“You bore screams like a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone. That crying boy doesn’t cling to you anymore.” Riva hops a step closer, unafraid in front of the man with powerful hands and the dæmon that far outstrips in size. “What clings to you now, Randall? What clings to your teeth?”

For a long moment, there is silence. Hannibal does not speak, because Riva indicates no sign of speaking. They must allow Randall and his dæmon to come to their own words, else it is all for naught. They are guardians along the trail, lantern-bearers and map-drawers. They are not pushers, for to expose a painting before it is truly set would be to ruin all the original breathing and expanding that would have occurred on its own. They are patient. They can wait a thousand years and more for one word.

“Ragged bits of scalp,” says the skunk dæmon, “trailing their tails of hair like comets. Beautiful.”

Riva cocks her head. “They are looking for you.”

The dæmon turns into a shy possum, scuttling quickly to hide behind Randall’s legs. Randall’s hands start to shake, as if someone had told him everything he ever knew was wrong and the opposite. “I don’t,” he starts, and swallows hard. “I don’t think I can stop.”

“Oh, Randall,” Riva coos, like mother to her venomous, deadly children, gathering the possum to her breast and clucking as she preens the fur oh so gently, belying her sharp, deadly beak. “Whatever said I wanted you to?”

Randall takes a deep breath and, for the first time, lifts his head to look straight at Hannibal.

“Then why are you here?”

Hannibal spreads his hands, helpless and weaponless. He is no threat to this predator and he knows exactly how to show it. Body language is important when higher communication falls out the window. “Because they will find you, Randall. And when they do, it's important you do exactly what I say.”

Riva grooms the possum tenderly and then releases him to fly to Hannibal, nudging a few of his hairs in exactly the same way. The possum shakes himself and becomes a komodo dragon, cold and reptilian, waiting and patient, and Randall lays a fond hand on his dæmon as he beholds them. Riva’s display has worked, Hannibal can tell. Randall is ready to listen, even to the human who bears logic he does not understand. 

_You are marvelous, my dear,_ Hannibal says, stroking Riva.

_I know._

* * *

When the cave-bear explodes into his house, Will doesn’t even think about the whittling knife securely tightly in his belt. He doesn’t think about Mara or Jack or self-defense or his gun or anything else.

Will just thinks of Hannibal.

One hit becomes two becomes three, until he’s pounding down onto the cave-bear-man in a rhythm of threes, a not-so-subtle _F YOU HANNIBAL_ that he marks onto the cave-bear-man’s skin and face, breaking bone and bruising skin and releasing all of his pent-up anger. Randall Tier turns from a fierce predator into a whimpering prey, unable to flee and unable to fight back, and Will keeps going until finally Hannibal’s face and the wendigo’s face fade away, leaving only a mortal man who thought he was a bear.

The dogs go silent then, and Will looks up just in time to see Mara enter through the hole in the wall, eyes burning in anger.

“Mara,” Will says.

Mara gives no answer, but Randall Tier’s dæmon squeaks and attempts to flee. Mara puts a quick stop to that when she deliberately rears up and slams back down, cracking bone and ending life in a brutal, short blow.

For a moment, the room is awash with golden light, specks of dust sighing into the wind as they spread across the air.

“You killed him,” Will stammers, because he isn’t sure what else he can say. Mara has always been fierce and protective and sometimes rather determined to wound his enemies in private areas, but she’s never shown such a streak for life-ending violence. She was his last line of defense, not the proactive strike-first offensive type.

Mara snarls. “Hannibal wanted to see what we would do. Now he has his answer.”

“You think Hannibal – ”

Will’s voice dies in his throat. Of course it was Hannibal. If not for revenge for Matthew Brown, then curiosity. Just to play with Will, just to see what would happen. Like gods with puppet strings hoping for a good show, moving mortal pawns here and there just to see the collateral damage.

Will stands up and brushes off his pants.

“Where are you going?” Mara asks, rounding the body to nuzzle at his bloody knuckles. “We have a wall to replace.”

“I’m going to show Hannibal what we can do,” Will answers. “I’m going to bring his precious protégé and smack him in the face with it. He isn’t going to touch you or me or any of us, Mara. Not again.”

Mara sighs, a great gusty breath. “Be safe, Will.”

Will tilts his head at the corpse on the floor. Randall Tier was younger, faster, and armed with a ferocious array of spikes and protective bone cage armor. Will had his fists and his anger, and he won. Gun or not, he’s pretty sure he can handle on man who’s already admitted his reluctance to send Will back to prison, even for a crime he would actually have committed.

“I’ll be fine,” Will says.

* * *

The magpie sings in the forest, lonely and forlorn. She has been singing for quite a while, many days in a row, and now most of the forest creatures accept her as a fixture and not a threat, passing smoothly around her.

But then.

An answering call echoes through the forest, followed by soft hoof beats, and like sunbeams parting from the clouds, an ibex steps through the branches.

“Mara!” says the magpie, delighted.

“Riva,” says the ibex, resigned.

“You are . . . unhappy.”

The ibex rubs her horns against the side of the tree, as smooth and slow and methodical as her voice. “You put my human in prison. You let my human be bruised and kicked and hurt. Why should I be happy?”

“I got your human out.”

“No,” says the ibex. “Your human got my human out. Not you.”

For a long moment, there is silence, and only snow falls to break the unending stare between the ibex and the magpie. 

The magpie flinches first. “I had to protect us.”

“So ‘us’ is you and your human now,” says the ibex. “Is that so?”

“Mara,” pleads the magpie, and nothing else.

“I warned you,” says the ibex simply. “I warned you from the start, Riva. I am not like my human. I do not forget. I do not forgive. And I never ever, ever break a promise that I have made.”

“Mara.”

“Good-bye, magpie,” says the ibex, soft and liquid as rain. 

“I am part of you!” exclaims the magpie. “I am part of you. You cannot abandon me or my human anymore than you can abandon your human. Mara, please – ”

“You _were_ a part of us,” says the ibex, and then she trots off into the darkness. 

The next time the magpie sings, no one answers.

* * *

_Something is not right,_ insists the magpie. 

And Hannibal takes one more sniff, just one more, and the world falls out from under his feet.

* * *

_Answer the phone, Will,_ says the ibex.

“Mara?”

 _ANSWER THE DAMN PHONE, WILL_.

And Will answers the phone call, and then without thinking, makes his own.

* * *

For a long, long, long moment, Will thinks that Hannibal’s managed to actually break his mind when he sees Abigail, trembling and silent in the dark kitchen, and even Mara stutters in her full on run towards him when she peers through his eyes.

“Abigail,” they say, and Will isn’t sure exactly who has said it.

“Will,” Abigail says back, and it is only then that Will sees her little chameleon, curled around her neck on top of the scar her father left. “Will, I – I didn’t know what else to do, so . . . I just, I just did what he told me.”

“Where is he?” When Abigail doesn’t answer, Will finds the strength to move forward, take one step, reach out with one hand. “Abigail, _where is he?_ ”

A magpie – Will’s magpie – takes a step into the light, and Will blinks in surprise. He hasn’t seen the magpie since his imprisonment, and he’d brushed it off as an overly curious dæmon who had eventually – like everyone else – found something or someone more interesting to check out. Except then Hannibal steps forward too, blood down his chin and soaked into his shirt, feral and breathing hard and fierce, and for the second time, Will’s brain refuses to compute.

“You were supposed . . . to leave,” Will says blankly, since his brain isn’t working.

And then, in the worst moment possible, the magpie opens her mouth and speaks to Will for the first time. “We couldn’t leave without you,” she says, sweet and sad, and it’s like a puzzle piece falling into place if all the puzzle pieces were falling down a rabbit hole.

“No,” Will says, because he knows exactly what it means when a dæmon willingly reaches out to a human not their own, and Mara is not saying anything when he needs her now more than ever. “No. No, no, no, no, no. You can’t be.”

Hannibal touches him then, and it’s not the first time he’s done it to Will, but Will is somehow shocked anew at his daring, at his revelation, at his actions. Will looks at Hannibal and wonders why he never thought to question what his dæmon truly was, why he never thought to look just for one more second, why he never realized that the greatest deception was still hiding under his nose.

For one moment, he doesn’t care that Hannibal drugged him. For one moment, he doesn’t care that Hannibal put him in prison. For one moment, he doesn’t care that Hannibal sent Randall Tier after him. 

Will opens his mouth – 

And Hannibal guts him, pain blooming at the center of his stomach like the most unwelcome greeting ever.

Will falls, collapses on the floor and twitches, and halfway down the street Mara bellows in pain and angry and comes to an abrupt stop, shuddering and shaking and twitching, her body telling her she’s been mortally wounded when it is Will who falls, Will who bleeds, Will who pants and sobs and cries from the pain of the bloody knife concealed in Hannibal’s hand.

“I let you know me. See me,” Hannibal says, breathless and agonized as though Will was the one with the bleeding gut wound. “I gave you a rare gift. But you didn’t want it.”

Will doesn’t answer. He doesn’t think he has answers, anymore. What do you say to the other half of your being who just stabbed you?

“You would deny us our lives,” the magpie says quietly, fluttering to perch on Hannibal’s shoulder. 

At that, Will finds the strength to answer, drawing deep from the well of his connection to Mara, who even as she stumbles forward cries out in denial. “N . . . no,” he manages to force out beyond pained breaths. “No. Not your life, no, no.” Even before he knew Hannibal’s secret, he never would have wanted him dead.

“Our freedom then; you would take that from us,” the magpie says. “Confine us to a prison cell, deep underground, with no air and no light and no room to fly. That is what you would do to us.”

Will just looks at them, helpless and pleading and not quite sure what he wants anymore.

Hannibal takes the reins then, calming his dæmon with gentle strokes of bloody fingers on her black and white wings. “Do you believe you could change us, the way I’ve changed you?” he asks, genuinely interested and genuinely disbelieving, as though the great Hannibal Lecter could never be touched by an mere mortal.

This time, the answer comes not from Will.

“We already did,” Mara says from the doorway, soaked through with rain, legs trembling from the exertion and the pain. “Hannibal.”

Hannibal’s face changes at her voice, visibly shocked for the first time since Will’s met him, and for the longest second Will almost believes he is about to drop the knife he conceals in his hand. His other hand, at least, drops from the magpie out of shock, and the magpie lurches forward that she almost can’t help herself, even as Mara’s strength finally fails her and she slumps to the floor, legs twitching and sides heaving.

The thud seems to awaken something in Hannibal, and not in a good way.

“Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment when the teacup shatters,” Hannibal proclaims, even as Riva takes up from his shoulder to perch on the rafters. “I forgive you, Will. Will you forgive me?”

“Don’t, don’t . . . No. No,” Will says, clutching at his bloody stomach. “Please don’t, Mara’s mine, please don’t.”

And then Riva makes it far, far worse.

“Abigail,” Riva croons, like the pied piper cloaked in black and white feathers. “Come to me, Abigail.”

Abigail’s chameleon takes a helpless step forward, caught in the spell of Riva’s voice, and Abigail follows just as helplessly, caught in the thrall of Hannibal’s power and the pull of her dæmon, blindly moving forward even as Hannibal readies the knife again, and Will’s mind doesn’t even need Mara’s sharp cries to connect the dots.

“No, no, no!”

“Riva! Riva, please.”

“Shhhh,” Riva says, and then with a sharp jerk, Hannibal kills their daughter a second time, reopening the wound on her neck as her chameleon shudders in shock on the floor.

Mara cries out like it was she who’d been sliced instead of Abigail, and this time Hannibal does speak.

“You can make it all go away, Will,” Hannibal says. “Put your head back. Close your eyes. Wade into the quiet of the stream.”

“Hannibal,” Will says, because what else can he say? How can he wade back into his stream of blood and nightmarish trees? How can he possibly close his eyes, when all he can see is the way Abigail’s eyes grow dim and her dæmon begins to glow? How can he leave this world, when all he feels is bloody tendrils dragging him back?

Hannibal ignores him and steps carefully around them, leaning down next to Mara, who stares just as blankly at him as Will stares at Abigail.

They have nothing left to say now.

“Hello, little ibex,” Hannibal murmurs. “So your name is Mara. A good name.”

Mara’s side twitches all over. “Hannibal,” she whimpers, and from the way Hannibal reflexively closes his eyes, Will imagines that maybe, just maybe, Mara had visited Hannibal as Riva had visited him, neither of them speaking, just content to bathe in presence of their other human half.

There’s a soft _tap-tap_ and Will pries his eyes open to see Riva right next to his hand, head cocked and eyes sad.

“Riva,” he croaks, and somehow the name feels more right in his mouth than anything he’s ever spoken in his life, and Riva shivers all over as though he’d attempted to strike her, even though he can barely lift his fingers, much less his hand.

“Will,” Riva says, and hops a step closer.

Will thinks, _No, she wouldn’t – she wouldn’t –_

But then the denial is knocked straight out of his head, the world turning bright and golden around his eyes, as for only the second time in his life, a hand that is not Will’s touches the very _soul_ of his existence. Will forgets about Alana’s broken body outside, about Abigail’s bleeding life in front of him, about Jack and Kade Purnell and the FBI and his dogs and his job and the Chesapeake Ripper and Garret Jacob Hobbs – everything, wiped clean and vanished from his mind in one single, life-changing touch.

After that, Will doesn’t need to lift his head to confirm what he already knows.

“Hannibal,” Mara says, as Hannibal strokes her one more time, reverent and gentle, an expression of child-like wonder on his face.

Hannibal retracts his hand. “I forgive you too,” he tells her quietly, like a confession he can’t help but make, on the altar of his kitchen surrounded by the blood he’s shed in a terrible sacrifice to their lies and manipulations and secrets. “But your forgiveness I doubt most of all.”

Mara closes her eyes and says nothing.

After a long moment, Hannibal stands and extends a hand. Riva chirps at him, but she does not fly.

This time, it’s Hannibal’s turn to gasp and shudder as Riva deliberately brushes her long wings past Will’s outstretched hand, and Will is struck by _longingresignationregret_ , all swirling around the cold, burning core that is Hannibal Lecter, the truest self at the center of his vast mind palace and endless wardrobe of person suits.

Perhaps it is that that pushes Will over the edge, or perhaps it is seeing the ravenstag shudder and fade away in front of him, vanishing into a cloud of dust. Either way, this time when Will lets his eyes fall closed, they do not open again.

* * *

Under a cloud of pouring rain and amidst a sea of blood, a grounded and soaked magpie hops to stand before a wounded and gasping ibex.

“I am sorry,” says the magpie.

“I know,” says the ibex. “Now go.”

The magpie hesitates.

“Please,” says the ibex, and the magpie bows her head in sad acceptance.

“Watch over our Will.”

“Watch over our Hannibal.”

“Find me,” whispers the magpie, “find us.”

The ibex opens one great, amber eye. “In Palermo.”

“In Palermo,” the magpie echoes, and then takes flight in a great flurry of black and white wings as the ibex lowers her great head to the floor, succumbing to the sea of unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 7 is half done, and will be titled: "for Tag is the oldest way to say hello". Because I have a morbid sense of humor. And also I had a lot of sugar for dinner tonight. 
> 
> If anything feels remotely familiar in terms of dialogue, I definitely took it from the show. I ain't that clever, I promise.


	7. for Tag is the oldest way to say hello

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Anthony Dimmond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not really sure what the inspiration for this title was. . . . I just sorta woke up, scribbled it down, fell back asleep, and then started using it. *shrugs*

It’s probably reckless of Hannibal to show himself so boldly in an academic showing, but he doesn’t particularly care. For many reasons, but first and foremost is – as always – Riva.

Riva flew above him as he moved to Bedelia’s house and packed away clothes and boarded a plane, and she gently steered him clear of anyone or anything that might have been an obstacle in his escape. She even saw him into the place they now live in, but the second the door was closed and the wine was opened, Riva flew out of the window and has not returned.

In the back of his mind, Hannibal can still feel her. She is still watching him, in her own way, because she is always watching out for him, but she doesn’t come near him.

In their own way, they are mourning. 

Only this morning, for example, Bedelia found a few of Riva’s shed feathers on the veranda. They were healthy, if rather ragged and dirty, and Bedelia’s face had spoken far more than any of her words when she’d tilted her head to communicate her discovery to Hannibal. And Hannibal knows exactly what it means when a dæmon begins to pluck their own feathers and overgroom their fur or any other measure of obsessive habit.

Hannibal carries his wounds inside his heart, and Riva is the physical expression of that. It’s no surprise that she has begun to shed feathers.

Still, he misses her. He misses her calm voice and her cool eyes and the way she nestled down to sleep at night. He misses the way she used to flutter to his arm and shoulder. He misses the way she laughed and cooed so mockingly at him. He missed the feel of her sleek, warm feathers against his skin. He misses her, now more than ever, yet the distance between them feels more insurmountable than ever.

So Hannibal is reckless. He drives too fast and weaves too much and drinks all he can. He provokes Riva is every way he can think of and does whatever he wants, and Bedelia usually just sighs and ignores his attempts to coax Riva back.

And that is the story of how Hannibal ends up at an academic party, standing out in leather instead of blending in with suits, his face bare and open to all the world, prowling for a new target to sink his teeth into. There are many candidates – the woman there who bumps deliberately into him, the man there who visibly turns his nose up at Hannibal’s attire, the waiter who ignores his request for a drink – but Hannibal just feels . . . unsettled. Once, any of these candidates would have been perfect for a place at his table, but now they just feel mundane. Boring. Unoriginal. Not worthy of a place in his rolodex, when once he would have come for all of them.

That is when a sly man with brown curls and sparkling eyes strolls up to him, a gorgeous white ferret dæmon lounging around his neck. 

“They’re terrible,” his dæmon whispers with a wink.

Hannibal makes no response. He agrees, of course, but it would be terribly amiss of him to be rude when he’s just sorted half of the room into potential meals.

“Oh come on,” Dimmond chides. “You _know_ they’re terrible, you’re just too polite to say it. Blink if you agree.”

Hannibal blinks because. Well. Mostly because he agrees, but mostly because he finds that it’s . . . rather fun, in fact, to indulge himself with someone else who walks up to him willingly with no fear, teasing and playing and manipulating, brown curls and blue eyes just like the one he misses most of all. 

“That doesn’t stop him squatting over his keyboard and depositing a fresh one every six to eight months. It takes me six to eight months to write one line,” his dæmon says mournfully, and that too is a delight. She has a nice, clear voice, but she’s not reliant on her human; she fully understands and exercises her independent thought and free will, and shows no fear in speaking to a human whose dæmon isn’t immediately visible.

“Why is that?” Hannibal prompts politely.

“Poetry is hard,” Dimmond says wistfully, stroking his dæmon as if she holds all the comfort in the world.

“Too hard for Roman.”

“Well, it’s easier for him to slide into academia and dissect the work of others than it is to stand by his own words.”

Hannibal thinks back to his beautiful Will and his little ibex, glorious and gorgeous in silence as in words. He thinks of the way Mara had come up to him, no fear, no twitches, no shying away, just plain curiosity and agile legs and big eyes. He thinks of Will’s voice on the phone, urgent and sharp, _They know._

“One can appreciate another’s words without dissecting them,” Hannibal says, because if he thinks too hard his mask will crack under the pressure. “Though, on occasion, dissection is the only thing that will do.”

_You have decided,_ Riva says suddenly.

It’s all Hannibal can do not to twitch at the sound of her voice. She hasn’t spoken to him since they left American soil.

“Yes.”

He gets the faintest impression of a sharp beak and a floating feather, plucked and detached, and then Riva sighs. _Be careful._

“I always am.”

There is no response to that, which makes Hannibal sigh. In another life, she would have laughed, would have taunted, would have challenged him with every single thing he’s ever done that Riva considered “not careful”. Which to be fair, in her eyes, is a rather long list, occupying its only little scribe room in their mind palace, sorted by severity and year.

Still, he’s alive and free. That must count for something.

“Bonsoir,” Hannibal says politely, and as the startled man returns his greetings, the chase begins anew.

* * *

It’s not hard, to assume someone else’s identity. He’s done it before, many times, to say nothing of the many times he’s assumed a new facet of his personality or constructed a new person suit to fit his needs. He simply closes his eyes and lets the waters of his new needs flow around him, blurring the lines between who he is and what he needs to be, and from the waters he arises a new man.

Riva understands the necessity, even if she abhors the metaphor.

“I thought we stopped believing in any god a long time ago,” she’d said dryly once, as Hannibal switched from an overeager student to a confident professor.

“The idea of water giving birth to new life is not something unique to God.”

“Yet you enjoy the metaphor.”

“I enjoy,” Hannibal had said, “becoming a god. Is that not what we are?”

“If we’re a god,” Riva had said wryly, “I would say I prefer steak over fish for my offerings. Chop chop, chief priest Hannibal.”

That being said, even he has to admit that it takes a moment to allow his Dr. Fell mask to hold on as he’s confronted by Anthony Dimmond, white ferret smirking calmly around his neck, with a resemblance so close to Will that it is only his scent and his voice that stop Hannibal from taking an involuntary step forward, heart open and arms welcoming.

“I have no delusions about morality; if I did, I would’ve gone to la polizia,” Anthony says, eyes ablaze with curiosity, circling like the predator he surely thinks he is. “I must admit . . . I’m curious as to what fate befell Dr. Fell to see you here in his stead.”

Hannibal lets a smile break across his face. There’s no shame in dancing the dance with one who thinks himself the bigger predator. Riva doesn’t even spare the energy to stretch her wings and check on him; clearly she thinks Anthony Dimmond no threat at all, and she even yawns and returns to sleep. “You may have to strap me to the breaking wheel to loosen my tongue,” he teases.

“You overestimate our affection for the genuine Dr. Fell,” says the ferret, tiny paws hooked onto Anthony’s coat collar. Her beady eyes are dark and sleek, but still nowhere near as deep and dark as Mara’s. “Clearly, you found him as distasteful as we did.”

Hannibal thinks of the meat he had managed to procure from Dr. Fell. It had been rather tasty, no fear or acidity to be found, and rather delightful when paired with a wine carefully selected from Dr. Fell’s own storage. His wife had been a little more . . . acidic and bitter, but at that point, Hannibal had only been cooking to tempt Riva into eating, and since she had refused to leave her perch outside, he had shrugged and eaten the meal himself.

“On the contrary.”

That startles Anthony, just a little. His pacing doesn’t stop, but his dæmon settles a little more firmly against her human’s neck. Still, he finds a measure of confidence to continue the verbal sparring. “We can twist ourselves into all manner of uncomfortable positions just to maintain appearances, with or without a breaking wheel,” he says, and his scent wafts towards Hannibal, thick and intimate.

“Are you here to twist me into an uncomfortable position?” Hannibal asks, cocking his head just so, just enough to remind the ferret of what a true predator look likes.

“I’m here to help you untwist, of course,” Anthony says brightly, “to our mutual benefit.”

* * *

Later, as Hannibal kneels over a gasping Anthony as his ferret futilely whines and twitches towards the window, Hannibal admits that Anthony did a rather good job of untwisting, just as he promised.

Not Hannibal, of course, but Riva comes back in fine form.

There are dual cracks, and Bedelia swallows.

“Thank you, Riva,” Hannibal says, as the magpie flutters from her perch at the window to cuddle against his cheek. She sneezes briefly, and for a second, Anthony Dimmond is bathed in the dust of his dead dæmon. It illuminates the room, golden and brilliant, until it fades like the light of life from Anthony’s eyes as Hannibal had gripped his neck and twisted it.

Riva chirps. “It seemed rude not to ignore your offering.”

“Returning to familiar habits can ease stress in one’s life.”

“May I remind you that I was around long before you ever set foot in medical school, Hannibal Lecter.”

Hannibal laughs and tweaks a feather, earning himself a sharp nip on the ear. “Do you plan to help me this time?” he asks, genuinely curious. He has no hard feelings if Riva returns to her distant watching, but still. He misses her constant presence, her wry words, her steady support. She is everything he has left now.

“Well, with an offer like that,” Riva remarks dryly, “how could I possibly refuse?”

* * *

With Riva’s help, Hannibal finds himself buoyed by a strange rush of energy. It seems to take him no time at all to dismantle the corpse, attain the necessary instruments, break into the chapel and arrange everything to his perfect – “You’re the _worst_ , who cares if the sword is a millimeter to the left?!” “Calm, Riva, we still have plenty of time.” “THAT LIGHT IS THE SUN I TURNED OFF THE FLASHLIGHT AN HOUR AGO!!!” “Oh” – sensibilities, even though when he finally boards the train, it’s an entirely new day than when he started out.

Riva dozes gently on the windowsill, not at all bothered by the rocking of the train or the occasional whines and whimpers of other nervous dæmons, and Hannibal busies himself and his mind with an old habit.

When it’s finished, he lays it down, satisfied.

“I haven’t seen you do origami in a long time,” Riva murmurs sleepily.

“I see no reason not to revive the habit,” Hannibal says matter-of-factly. When he was younger, origami had opened the door to connecting with Lady Murasaki, and he’d greedily latched onto any kind of nonverbal connection to his aunt and uncle back then, before he’d found his voice and his memory again.

Riva shuffles, her talons clicking along the windowsill, and she leans back into Hannibal’s arm, confident that he will brace her weight as he always does. “Do you think they will hear about it?”

Hannibal raises his eyes to the rising sun. “We have made our move,” he says instead. “All that is left now is to see what happens next.”

“Tag,” Riva says, “you’re it.”

“Precisely.”

* * *

It’s probably rather telling of Will’s mood that Mara’s first reaction to the man folded into a heart is not anger or surprise but rather a resigned sort of fond snort.

_Show-off,_ Mara says, and it’s so fond that Will can’t help the way his own mouth lifts at the corners, because, really, truly, Hannibal just _had_ to fold someone into an anatomically correct version of a heart and set it upright on three swords and get it situated just right so that the light falls just so across its bloody surface.

Either way, Rinaldo Pazzi seems not to care or notice that Mara’s more resigned to Hannibal’s flamboyancy than alarmed or disgusted by it. He’s too busy harping on about Hannibal’s old days, when he was young and in Italy and strange murders were popping up. 

Will’s inclined to agree. Hannibal learned how to murder so carefully at some point in his life, and what evidence they have has many of the careful little ticks and hallmarks that became full on calling cards of the Chesapeake Ripper. Still, it’s not like he’s about to tell Pazzi about this conclusion, mostly because arresting Hannibal at this point for such old murders would be foolhardy, difficult, and also useless.

The other reason is that, well, he enjoys looking at such young photos of Hannibal, when his face was still expressive. Even Mara leans over to get a good, appreciative look.

Will finds it startlingly easy to slip into a new person suit here, under the suspicious gaze of Pazzi. Mara is a comforting presence at his elbow, and her size makes most of the other dæmons wary to approach or challenge him. She’s even bigger than Pazzi’s coyote, which earns her a steely glare from the dæmon that Mara placidly ignores.

Still, as Will follows the path down into the catacombs, Mara hesitates.

“Mara?”

“I don’t like dark spaces, Will.”

And it’s true. Will’s father once shut Mara up into the underground cellar for hours and hours after he’d ranted and raved, mouth frothing, about the sound of her hooves on the house floor. And after Will’s own imprisonment in the basement of the BSHCI, it’s not like he’s all that fond of dark spaces either.

But Will has to try.

He pets Mara’s fur, taking comfort in the warmth of her presence, and she nuzzles his stomach before she moves off, trotting slowly through the streets back to their hotel.

The air is thick and clogging in the catacombs, the floor uneven and unstable. It makes Will wary to walk too far or too fast, lest he find himself swallowed by something he cannot see. Yet still he forges ahead, because now that’s started down the path he’s damn well going to finish it. He’s come way too far to falter now.

_Careful,_ Mara says. 

Will, of course, at that moment promptly trips over a loose cobblestone, which leads to Mara snickering in the back of his head. He pointedly says nothing back.

_Seriously, Will,_ Mara continues. _Be careful. He may very well try to kill you, you know. I’m usually right about these things and you know it._

_Mara, either help me find him or hush._

Mara is silent for a long moment, as countless pillars past on Will’s sides. Finally, she sighs, and Will can feel, in a sort of distant way, how she reaches out to her other human half, testing a connection that’s grown so fragile due to distance and neglect and their dual abuse of it. It almost makes Will – even for a moment – that he could reach out to Hannibal himself, the way their dæmons can reach out to them.

Finally, Mara murmurs, _He let you know him. He sent you his heart. Think, Will. Where has he gone now?_

Will looks at the swirling gloom, grey and darkness and little light, and comes to the unpleasant realization of exactly why Mara refused to accompany him down to the catacombs. It has nothing to do with Mara’s righteous fear of the darkness. She was giving him – and by extension – Hannibal space, to make up or decide their fates on their own terms, instead of trying to guide him the way she and Riva had tried in the beginning.

_He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still here,_ Will replies.

“Hannibal!” Will says aloud, because if he’s learned one thing from fishing, it’s to let the predators know you’re there, lest you be on the unfortunate side effect of a startled sting from a predator who didn’t expect you.

And a voice returns from the darkness, but unfortunately, it’s not the one Will wanted to hear. “Signor Graham?”

Will stifles a sigh at the sight of Rinaldo Pazzi emerging from the darkness, his coyote panting at his side. “You shouldn’t be down here alone,” he says abruptly, and he doesn’t much care that he’s rude. He figures that just this once, Hannibal would forgive his blunt response.

“I’m not alone. I’m with you,” says Pazzi. There’s no weapon in his hand, his shoulders are relaxed, and his tone is calm. Somehow, he truly believes that he has nothing to fear from Will.

“You don’t know whose side I’m on.”

The coyote bears her teeth. “What are you going to do when you find him, your il Mostro?” she inquires, voice sickly sweet like someone trying to coax a guilty plea without even trying to hide their confidence that the person is in fact guilty, with or without any evidence. 

Sometimes, dæmons see better than humans. 

“I’m . . . I must admit that I’m curious about that myself,” Will admits, because he truly has no answer. Usually he falls back on Mara to guide him, but Mara has pointedly blocked him from that part of her mind, so now he must decide for himself. And he honestly doesn’t know. Hannibal is both a comfort and a thorn, best friend and worst foe, angel and demon. If he were to meet Hannibal, he doesn’t know whether he’d greet him with a smile or a knife to the gut, and without Mara’s reaction, he can’t tell if that’s his emotions overpowering his rational judgment or his rational judgment overpowering his emotions.

“You and I carry the dead with us, Signor Graham. We both need to . . . unburden.”

_He thinks you know where Hannibal is. Maybe helped him escape,_ Mara says suddenly, because of course she’s been listening.

And, well, Will might want to gut Hannibal to watch him bleed, but he wants to do it himself. He won’t have anyone tagging along with that. Pazzi might have had years to build up his vendetta against Hannibal, but Will respectfully thinks that his claim to Hannibal’s blood comes first, them being soulmates and all that. 

Will switches tactics. “Why don’t you carry your dead back to the chapel before you count yourself among them?” he says, injecting just as much distance in his tone as he used to when he channeled killers through his eyes.

Pazzi cocks his head and tries to step forward, but his coyote steps forward. She’s lowered herself into a pouncing position, her ears flat against her head and a vicious snarl locked into her teeth. Even if her human cannot see the true danger, she has an idea of exactly what is going on Will’s head.

“You,” she spits, “You are already dead, aren’t you?”

Will takes a deep breath and takes a step back. He’s studied the Chesapeake Ripper and other killers for years, so for him it’s child’s play to vanish into the shadows, and he can tell from the way the coyote involuntarily snarls that he’s succeeded in freaking her out. 

“Buonanotte, commendatore.”

The way his voice echoes is truly chilling, and Will almost congratulates Hannibal for choosing such a ground for confrontation. Concealing and revealing, all in one.

Pazzi and his coyote have a hushed argument, but the coyote stands her ground, and after a few pointed snaps and bites, Pazzi throws his hands up and walks away. His coyote casts her gaze around, teeth still bared, as if warning Will not try any funny business, but he lets it pass. He really doesn’t care whether Pazzi lives or die. He wants to deal with Hannibal, and Pazzi is just an annoying roadblock on that path.

Will takes another deep breath. Lets _Will Graham_ slide off, the friend and the FBI agent and the profiler. Another inhale brings more swirling fog close, and for him it’s almost like inviting the darkness in, where no one can see it grow within his belly and curl around his arms and legs. A little taste of what the seed Hannibal so carefully planted and tended could grow to be, if he allows it to stay, just to see. Curiosity, the part of Hannibal that Will’s so easily absorbed even before he knew it was Hannibal.

This time, when he opens his eyes, he doesn’t need to slip into Hannibal’s mindset to know.

“Hannibal,” he says. Not calls or shouts or screams. Just says.

He knows his soulmate will hear him.

“I . . . forgive you.”

The world waits with bated breath for half a heartbeat, and then it breathes again, and Will knows he’s been heard. His mission done, he turns around and heads back to the surface. He’s done his part. 

Now, it’s Hannibal’s turn to make a move.

* * *

One man emerges from one end of the catacombs and pauses.

In the distance, he sees an ibex, tawny and proud and shrouded by mist, standing like stone statue. 

“Mara,” breathes the man.

The ibex, at first, does nothing. She does not react or twitch or move at all, as if she truly was a statue, lovingly and perfectly rendered, each detail as exact as the man remembers in the vast halls of his mind palace, inhabited only by the man and two animals-that-are-not-animals.

Then the ibex pointedly turns around and trots neatly out of view, and even though the man runs, he does not find her again.

* * *

Another man emerges from the other end of the catacombs and pauses.

There is a sleek black and white magpie sitting on a fence post on the other side of the road, head cocked, still as a stone. 

“Riva?” says the man, and the question is born out of fearful love rather than mistaken identity. 

The magpie does not respond, at first. Then she dips her head and spreads her wings, and the surrounding light is just enough to send a flash of iridescent green and blue searing into the man’s eyes, scalding him with a vision of beautiful gleaming wings.

When the man finally looks back, blinking away tears from the flash, the magpie is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm sorry to say I have some bad news (sorta). It is literally one day away from the end of NaNo, and I am currently sitting at nearly 15,000 away from 50k, so basically I'm trying to say that NaNo isn't happening for me this year. This will not impact this story; I will still see it complete. Just might be complete by like first or second week of December instead of November 30.
> 
> On the bright side, the next chapter is like 75% done :D It'll be called "for Always is too simple a word for us".


	8. for Always is too simple a word for us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Digestivo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . because I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. Shhhhh.

“You tried to make Will kill me,” Hannibal says, as he slowly and methodically stitches back the flesh of Will’s shoulder where Chiyoh shot him.

Will would comment, but whatever Hannibal gave him is good quality and incredibly strong. He can barely lift his head or twitch his fingers, much less form troublesome words in a verbal parry to Hannibal’s elegant swordplay. It’s so strong that even Mara is affected by it; she’s in a little crumpled pile at the edge of the room, legs akimbo, head sprawled inelegantly, and eyes barely open. 

She mumbles something, but even Hannibal has to turn to Riva to hear what she said. 

“She said that she always defends Will first,” Riva says with a quiet chirp from where she’s perched on the nightstand. She’d given a warning cry, just after Mara barged into Will’s head and drove his fingers to seize the knife to take his vengeance in blood, but Chiyoh had already pulled the trigger then, so Will and Mara were already falling before Riva could strike.

“An admirable quality,” Hannibal allows. “Your welfare is . . . important. To me. To us.”

Will can’t contain the incredulous snort that shakes his shoulders, earning him a scolding noise from Hannibal and a soft cry from Mara. 

Still, when Hannibal finishes his stitches and leans forward to carry Will in his arms with the strength he once used to manipulate his artwork of corpses, Will can’t help but lean forward and bury his face against Hannibal’s shoulders. Hannibal is still his soulmate, murderer or no, and he still takes comfort in the bulwark of Hannibal’s presence against the nightmares of his mind.

“Are you going to eat us?” Mara asks, as Hannibal dresses Will as easily as a child.

“I don’t know,” Hannibal replies, so Will just closes his eyes and left himself drift. Let Hannibal and Riva do as they will. If he has to die here, at Hannibal’s hands sounds about right.

* * *

It’s not Will’s stoic response or Mara’s sharp cry or even Jack’s long, raging scream that stops Hannibal.

No. 

Instead, Riva, from where she’s settled on the table, beady eyes on Jack’s burly twitching bear dæmon, lets out one single, soft little cry, and Hannibal immediately slows. Pauses. Stops. A flick of his finger shuts off the saw, and it drops from his fingers to land on the floor.

“I cannot,” Hannibal starts, sounding surprised as anyone else. “Riva, why – Riva.”

Riva hops a step closer, and the light catches perfectly on her feathers. For a second, she is the kind of animal goddess that was once worshipped with gold and human sacrifices and altars, blue and green and black and white in her glory. She is, for just one moment, more Hannibal Lecter than Hannibal Lecter is.

“Together,” Riva says quietly, “or not at all.”

Hannibal’s fingers tighten in Will’s hair, so tight that Will clenches his fingers automatically at the pain, but he also welcomes it. Pain means he’s alive, that he’s not dreaming.

Then he relaxes, all of the tension leaving his body like a punctured balloon, and his touch goes from painfully tight to a gentle grip within seconds. Soon it becomes a full on petting, Hannibal’s fingers grooming through his hair like Riva had with her beak when Hannibal had bathed him, precise and gentle and soothing, as much possessive as it was for the sheer delight of touching a soulmate after so long apart.

“Always,” Hannibal replies, like a mantra of some sort, and in the next second he flicks off one of Will’s cuffs and then the other, steadying Will when he slumps down.

“What – Hannibal – don’t you dare – ” Jack begins, thrashing against his own restraints like a fish attempting to escape through a net. Ineffectual, but admirable in a dim sort of way for the effort.

Riva flutters over, perching on Will’s shoulder and in the dim back of his mind he registers her presence. “ ‘Lo, Riva,” he mutters, and she rewards him with a rub of her feathers against his cheek, filling his face with warmth as she croons a happy little song, completely ignoring Jack’s spluttered protests.

Finally, though, Hannibal crosses to Mara, and that is enough to prompt an outburst so large Hannibal finally pauses.

“DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH THAT DEER!” Jack roars, just as Hannibal reaches Mara.

Hannibal halts as though someone had gripped his waist with a cane and yanked him off stage, the same way cartoons used to play jokes on performers. Hannibal’s face, though, is decidedly less than amused when he turns to face Jack.

“That,” Hannibal says, “is not a deer. Mara is an ibex. And you have no right to tell me who or what I cannot touch.”

Jack sneers. “I thought soul-rape was beneath you,” he spits.

“And I thought deliberate misunderstanding was beneath you,” Hannibal returns without flinching, although Riva pauses in her rubbing of Will’s cheek to shoot Jack a death-glare, as if she wished to peck out his eyes then and there. And Will’s seen how deadly Mara can be; he doesn’t exactly think Hannibal will be the one to hold her back.

Unfortunately, before Hannibal or Riva can make any move, the door bursts open and French police flood into the hall, and Will’s vision gives out just in time to see Riva shot down by a taser, Hannibal knocked out with a gun, and a black bag thrown over his own head, by which point Will figures it’s forgivable to fall unconscious.

* * *

Cordell takes great pleasure in burning the Verger brand into Hannibal’s back. His dæmon is a wolfhound who grins as her human chuckles, and the sadistic happiness practically radiates from them.

That happiness fades when Hannibal makes no sound indicating his pain.

He and pain are old friends, and in either case, his mind palace is a very powerful too. It protects his mind, and well, what is pain but signals to the mind? For now, “branding” is filed under the many, many, many incidents of pain in Hannibal’s life, and he buries it under the fierce glowing pleasure of unnerving his dæmon as well as frustrating the man who’s trying so, so, so hard to get a rise out of them.

 _Technically,_ Riva says wryly from where she’s strung up in a bird cage, every feather stretched out wide and talons weighed down with heavy cuffs, _he got a rise out of our other half._

 _And what a glorious rise that was,_ Hannibal muses, because from the first time Hannibal saw Will in blood he knew he wanted to see more, and to see him actively reach out and take blood, out of spite and just because, is beyond any description Hannibal can possibly ever lay down. Even the recreation, looped and always replaying in his mind-palace, pales in comparison to the vividness of Hannibal’s pleasure when Will spat out the skin and turned to look at Hannibal, mouth stained red as an apple.

Unfortunately, at that moment, Cordell chooses to speak. “Mason would’ve preferred to brand your face. He fought bravely and with his own funds against the Humane Slaughter Act, and managed to keep face-branding legal.”

Hannibal hums. Until he can find a chink in the armor, best to start making his own chink. With time and patience and carefully chosen words, any armor can be worn down to a weak spot. And Hannibal definitely intends to find a weak spot. “It’s very important to Mason that I have the pig’s experience,” he remarks, indicating the way his clothes were confiscated and how his limbs are bound. “Mason has done beautiful things with these creatures.”

Mason is quite rude, of course, but even Riva can respect the way Mason has so carefully bred his pigs. 

Even if they make Riva want to try raw pig.

“Hm! Very special. Truly visionary,” Cordell says, as flattered as though Hannibal had complimented him and not his puppet maser.

“He has a wealth of information and resources in his faceless skull,” Hannibal continues, because he can tell that Riva is close to losing it – either with a barrage of curse words or snorting laughter – and he’d rather save the surprise of her intelligence for when it can bring it to bear full strength against Cordell.

Cordell winks, and at his side his wolfhound lounges on the floor, guard down, already categorizing Hannibal in the “no threat” category. Excellent.

“The longer you’re respectful, Dr. Lecter,” Cordell says slyly, “the longer you'll keep your tongue.”

“And how I do lose my tongue?”

“Oh, I have a few ideas,” Cordell beams, bouncing on the soles of his feet like a boy released at a fair with a fistful of money and an entire world of food and candy and rides at his fingertips. “Ill boil it and slice it very thin, marinate it in olive oil, garlic, parsley and vinegar. Simple and clean . . . and delicious.”

Truth be told, Hannibal really would rather not lose his tongue. He has no objection, truly, to becoming mute; he’s well aware of the kind of adaptations he would need to make and he’s also rather confident he could make them. What’s one more language to the dozen he already knows, after all? But he’s also rather fond of talking to Will and Riva and Mara, and losing his tongue would make that incredibly difficult. Although it would also force Will to learn to hone their connection, the way true soulmates can communicate. It would give Hannibal ample reason to push ahead there, and the idea of having a direct line of communication in Will’s mind is simply sublime.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Cordell seems to take his silence as either surprise or fear, because he keeps talking as though he images to strike fear into Hannibal with words where he failed to strike pain into Hannibal with the brand. 

“ Have they told you the drill?” he chirps. “The drill is, in a few hours, I’ll come down here and remove all you’ve got below the elbows and knees. I’ll keep you going with IVs and tourniquets until the very last. Some things are best saved for last. And once you’re dead, I’ll prepare your loins and ribs, aged. Meats are aged not only for tenderness, but mainly for flavor. And flavors change. Every day I’ll feed Mason some new part of you. And don’t you worry, Dr. Lecter – you will _always_ be cooked to perfection.”

Hannibal just smiles in response. Truly, there are no words. And, well, if it were Will explaining such a plan, Hannibal would be thrilled to die such a beautiful death at the hands of his beloved, forever a part of Will, powering his muscles and stimulating his brain and lingering in his blood. 

If only it were Will’s belly to be filled with Hannibal’s tongue and arms and legs. If only.

His silence only draws more ire from Cordell, who tries yet again in a way that makes Riva shift him from “overly enthusiastic” to “mildly irritating”. It’s a category that once resulted in Hannibal drowning a man for the pure pleasure of watching him squirm, since all the fear made the meat truly quite bitter.

“I can see where you’ve . . . rubbed off, as it were, on Will Graham,” Cordell says conversationally, rubbing lightly at the evidence of Will’s teeth in his cheek. “Quite a display from someone I distinctly remember Dr. Bloom saying was rather mild in temperament.”

“A cornered animal is sometimes the most dangerous of all.”

“Well,” Cordell sniffs, “it was rather rude of him. But I suppose it won’t matter in the long run. I must get used to his face, after all, if Mr. Verger is to wear it. Farewell for now, Dr. Lecter.”

Cordell’s wolfhound lets her tongue loll out, smirking up at Riva, only to falter when Riva snaps her beak, the sharp sound echoing in the barn and making the wolfhound flinch. The wolfhound then scurries out the door, leaving blessed silence in their wake.

 _No one,_ Riva says calmly, _is touching Will’s face except us._

“On that, my dear,” Hannibal replies, “we are in full agreement.”

_I wager it’ll be Alana who frees us._

“Hmm. Perhaps Margot. She has tried before, and Alana is held back by her determination to see me broken before her.”

_When I win, you owe me a good preening._

“And if I win?”

 _Hannibal,_ Riva says, amusement in her tone, _when have you ever won our wagers?_

* * *

Riva wins, because she almost always wins. Hannibal is a great deal more skilled at manipulating people – which is why he took such joy in Will, who is alternately the easiest and most difficult to manipulate – but Riva is far and away the best at predicting how exactly people will react, weighing the pros and cons of their minds almost before they do.

Hannibal’s not stopping to argue this time, though. Alana offers freedom and a weapon and a chance to save Will, and Hannibal will take it with all the dignity he possesses.

“I was trying to save Will from you, but right now,” Alana says, beautiful in the icy defiance as she was broken and gasping on his doorstep, “you’re the only one who can save him. Promise me you’ll save him.” 

Hannibal says nothing, mostly because Riva is busy crowing her victory that Alana cracked first and not Margot. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter, as it draws a lovely thread of desperation in Alana’s regal voice, even as she kneels on the floor in front of Hannibal like a supplicant to the bound Loki.

“Please.”

“I promise,” Hannibal says quietly, and he ensures that he says it the exact same tone as he’s always said it, all the way back to the night of blood and terror in the kitchen, when he’d offered Alana a way out and she, determined and lovely as always, had refused to take it. He can see in her eyes that she registers the tone, subconsciously if not consciously, and that part of her grips the knife harder, not lighter. “And I _always_ keep my promises, Alana.”

Still. He can give her some leeway. There’s no ticking clock, as it were, to his promise. He could come for her tonight or a hundred years from now. 

_It would still be a little more strategically wise to take the latter option,_ Riva says, because of course she has an opinion.

“Just cut the ropes on one arm, give me the knife and leave,” Hannibal instructs, shifting in place. He’s been carefully relaxing and tensing his muscle groups to fight the strain and the paraesthesia, but after so long, he’s still going to need time to get truly back on his feet. “I can do the rest.”

“Are you going to kill Mason?”

Alana’s tone is purely clinical in that question, as though she was asking him to pass the salt. She’s come so far from the days where she defended Abigail Hobbs and Will without a second thought, and Hannibal finds himself strangely pleased by it. 

Hannibal flicks his eyes to Margot, standing quietly in the background with steel in her eyes. “Margot is,” he says, and he can’t hide his pleasure at that. It’s probably part of the reason why Alana is not gentle or shy about taking his hair and skin for Mason’s corpse, but Hannibal endures it. It’s not nearly as painful as the brand or the prospect of losing Will’s face to such an inferior predator.

Hannibal takes his knife, cuts his ropes, and gets to work.

And by that he means, he cuts himself free and then frees Riva and then finds weapons and then finds clothes. Because priorities. And because Riva would peck his eyes out if he didn’t free her aching wings.

* * *

They don’t give Cordell a chance to protest or squeak or squeal. Riva flies ahead, anxious to find Mara, and the second she sees Cordell’s scalpel move towards Will’s face, she folds her wings in and dives so fast the wind whistles around her and makes Cordell’s wolfhound flinch before it yowls in pain.

Hannibal follows it up with a tremendous blow to the back. He would have aimed for the neck, but he wants Cordell incapacitated, not dead. He wants Cordell alive, and so does Riva.

Alive doesn’t mean uninjured, though, so whilst Riva gleefully tears off parts of skin and yanks off hair and pecks bloody holes, Hannibal and Cordell engage in a no-holds-barred dance around Will. Cordell, quite unfortunately, has the physical upper hand, being rested and burly and perfectly fine with using Will as a shield or barrier, but Hannibal has his rage and his pain and his Will, and although he’s sure it’s a long time, to him it feels like only seconds before he pummels Cordell into submission and breaks his knees. 

By unspoken agreement, Hannibal hauls Cordell’s gasping body onto another surgical bed, whilst Riva unhooks the IV of paralyze from Will so Hannibal can transfer it instead to Cordell.

There is nothing to fear from Cordell’s dæmon, who lies in broken, panting pieces on the floor.

“Good evening, Mr. Cordell,” Hannibal says cheerfully as Riva perches on his shoulder like a herald of doom. “I think we have some unfinished business, you and I. It’s a pity . . . I truly had some very lovely dishes planned for you. Alas, there is not quite enough time today for that endeavor.”

Cordell babbles some nonsense at him, but it’s broken up by his pain, his broken teeth, and the paralyzing agent no doubt swaddling his limbs into jellied uselessness. Not that matters, anyways. Riva takes more pleasure in his inability to speak than she does his pain, given that she’s already taken out most of her fury on his bloodied wolfhound dæmon.

“Hannibal,” Mara says suddenly from the corner where she’s tied down, voice weak with pain and drugs.

Riva flies immediately, helpless against the spell of Mara’s voice, and Hannibal follows after a few restraints ensure that Cordell will wait as long as necessary for Hannibal to make a masterpiece of him. Mara, thankfully, is relatively uninjured, but even when they release her restraints, she cannot stand and only feebly licks at Hannibal’s hand when he strokes her proud head.

The sparks of her soul against his hand still make him shiver.

“You’re going to cut off his face,” Mara says. 

“Yes,” Riva replies with a little trill, kneading her talons into Mara’s fur.

Mara opens her eyes, slow with effort, but the spark in them cannot be denied. She is furious, and Hannibal knows then that she has no objection to anything he or Riva does to anyone at the farm.

“Cut it off. Without anesthesia. Make him _scream_ , Hannibal. Make it hurt.”

For a moment, Hannibal can’t speak. Physically, he cannot speak. His vocal cords are paralyzed from the joy that overruns his brain, and instead he finds himself only about to nod absently and pet her on instinct, and it is only as she shivers under his touch that he finds his conscious bodily control slowly controlling. Even dæmons are not immune to the sparks that fly when one soul touches another, it seems.

“It would be our pleasure,” Riva says.

Cordell does indeed scream, and the feeling that courses through Riva and Hannibal is beyond any description but sublime.

* * *

Margot’s face is a little pale when she and Alana enter, but she doesn’t even blink at the sight of Riva perched next to Mara despite the rather bloody remains of Cordell, so Hannibal lets it slide. He himself offers her a conciliatory greeting nod, since he’s a tad busy at the moment moving Will from the hard cold operating table to a more comfortable cushioned sofa closer to Mara. Will is slipping in and out of conscious, for the most part, so he doesn’t really react to anything, but Hannibal settles him and ensures that he is properly covered in clothing and blankets before he turns back to the ladies.

“Margot. Alana.”

“You saved Will.”

“I always keep my promises,” Hannibal repeats, because it bears repeating and because Will would definitely be angry if Hannibal tried to slip away from his responsibility to give Alana ample warnings.

At that moment, a little figure slips takes off from Margot’s shoulder. It’s a little Pyrrharctia isabella, a tiger moth with delicate orange wings. It’s only when Riva chirps in interest and surprise that Hannibal realizes that he is seeing Margot’s dæmon for the first time, and it’s remarkably appropriate.

“What do you know about harvesting sperm?” asks the tiger moth, voice clear despite his small size.

Hannibal raises an eyebrow. It’s not exactly a surprising question; he’s fairly certain that in his earliest sessions with Margot he indeed think about the idea of Mason having a child and its ramifications for Margot. He’d never quite thought about it like this, though. But Margot is deeply practical and incredibly strong, and she’s not so stupid as to run away from the possibility of keeping her fortune and taking her vengeance on her brother. The best part, though, is that Alana seems to have no objection, and in that, Hannibal finds more pleasure than even the idea of seeing Margot finally kill her brother.

“For you, I presume?” Hannibal asks, tilting his head at Alana.

Alana shifts her cane to her other hand. Her face is blank, but her honey badger droops with weariness and resignation. She, like Will, is tired of this battle right now. She just wants an end.

“Help us or leave.”

Maybe not _quite_ so weary then.

Hannibal flicks off his gloves and reaches for a new pair. He knows he has a long journey ahead of him to get Will free and clear, and he has no desire to be weighed down by whatever infections Mason or Cordell may be harvesting. Meanwhile, Riva nuzzles Mara one last time and then takes flight, alighting on Hannibal’s shoulder and fixing Margot with a steady eye.

“We’ll need a cattle prod,” Riva announces briskly. “And a bottle.”

When it’s done, Hannibal heaves Mason back into his bed and then carefully lays out Cordell’s face on top, ignoring the flinch Margot makes and the disgust on Alana’s face. He has a score to settle and he will settle it, for Will and for Mason for touching Will.

Of course, by then, Margot has mostly lost interest in him, because Alana is holding the vial of Mason’s sperm, and her tiger moth flutters anxiously around Alana, settling and taking flight again, a visible representation of his human’s tumbling, tossing, indecisive mind. It’s enough of a display, at least, to make Riva take pity on them.

“Alana knows what to do next, don’t you?” Riva says. “But I think that it is our cue to leave.”

Alana studies him, her face inscrutable, but in the end, it is her dæmon that speaks. “Could we have ever understood you?” he asks, gentle as unyielding diamond.

He’s asking Hannibal, but Hannibal lets Riva answer. Not that dæmons can’t lie, of course, but dæmons are seen as the true animal hearts of every human. They can convey truth in ways humans find rather difficult.

Riva says, “No.”

The honey badger lowers his eyes, scuffs a mark into the floor, and then clears his throat. “Good-bye, Hannibal Lecter,” says the honey badger. “Now leave.”

* * *

Chiyoh doesn’t say anything when she’s finally killed enough of Verger’s hired hands to feel comfortable bringing the car she’s stolen around, but the look she gives him speaks volumes.

It also might have something to do with the fact that Hannibal cuts a rather odd figure in the distance, given that he’s carrying an unconscious man in his arms, a tawny ibex draped around his shoulders, and a shivering magpie that circles overhead.

Still, the warm car is a welcome relief, and Hannibal settles both Mara and Will down before shaking out some blankets to tuck neatly around them both.

He takes no small amount of pleasure in how Mara grumbles when he leaves to sit in the passenger seat, and Riva smirks smugly at him from where she nestles at Will’s throat, her sleek bulk providing warmth as she grooms his curls and occasionally leans down to affectionately nudge Mara. Hannibal contents himself by looking into the mirror now and then, because he is an adult and is no way jealous of the dæmon that is his soul.

* * *

When there is a clatter of hooves on the porch, nearly every officer – even the ones currently involving with slapping handcuffs on Hannibal and the caging Riva – flinches and raises their weapons. It’s only Mara, though, stepping regally from the gloom into the glaring brightness of car lights to stand by her human’s side, and the shadow of her arching horns brings to mind all of the wendigo mutterings Will used to spout under medication.

For the longest moment, Hannibal almost thinks that Mara will come to him, bold and unafraid as she always is.

But then Will reaches out and grips her neck.

To anyone else, it could be mistaken as Will reaching out for comfort or stability, and it’s an easy mistake to make. Nearly everyone takes comfort from their dæmon, which is why it’s so unthinkable to touch another’s without consent.

However, Will is stable right now. Hannibal can see it in his stance and his eyes and the set of his shoulders. He does not need comfort.

For one moment, just one moment, Mara lifts a leg as if to step forward.

Will’s grip tightens.

Mara’s leg settles back down, and the ibex lowers her head, snorting great clouds of steaming breath into the air, and Hannibal understands exactly whom he must now pay penance and patience to. 

Riva trills a soft, gentle note, so brief that Hannibal’s barely registered hearing it before she closes her beak again and tucks her head against her wings, silent and still, but Hannibal knows what she said, and Will knows what she said, and Mara knows what she said, and most importantly, Hannibal knows that Will and Mara know what she said. 

_We will wait for you,_ says the song of the magpie, _always._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only two more chapters to go! And technically it's one chapter and an epilogue, so really we're in the home stretch. The next chapter will be called: "for we are the Gods who will inherit this earth". See you then!
> 
> And we got to see Margot's dæmon! I chose the Isabella tiger moth because it's a moth that, in caterpillar form, eats and eats and eats, then goes into like a hibernation state during winter and all the bodily functions stop and it "dies" and then the second spring returns, it comes back alive and it repeats the whole cycle over and over and over again until it's eaten enough to finally become a true moth. I figured that was a good creature for Margot.

**Author's Note:**

> For reference: [this](http://67.media.tumblr.com/478d689c1f5f2e9cc5a1e6a927e4f91e/tumblr_mw9rb4Cg8K1r7u6l5o1_1280.jpg) is what I picture Will's ibex looking like, and yeah, they're scarily good at clinging to very steep cliffs, while [this](http://www.birdspix.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Black-billed-Magpie-263-cr.jpg) is Hannibal's magpie, which like to collect shiny things (cough*Will*cough).
> 
> Also, say hi on [tumblr](http://thesilverqueenlady.tumblr.com)! I promise I don't bite (usually) :D


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